October 23, 2006 at 7:14PM I am Spartacus!
As Tom, James, Bernie, Donncha and many others have mentioned, Damien Mulley’s Thinkhouse PR troubles continue. The latest events in the saga are that his open letter to them has disappeared from Google (yet if you search Yahoo! or MSN, there it is) and that the Data Protection Moron has apologised--yes, apologised--to Thinkhouse PR because they had to investigate the complaint, something they’ve a statutory obligation to do. And to top it all off, apparently they’re not going to follow up and take action against Thinkhouse PR in spite of the fact that Damien’s complaint fits the profile of a valid one.
There are corrupt little banana republics in the world where you wouldn’t expect this kind of thing to happen, yet it happens in what is supposedly one of the wealthiest countries in the world. Then, as is often demonstrated, wealth, intelligence and backbone do not necessarily coincide.
So, in the tradition of these things, here’s Damien’s open letter reproduced verbatim:
I’m writing to make a formal complaint against Thinkhouse PR for continually sending unsolicited emails to one of my email accounts despite being asked not to. The email account in question is info [at] irelandoffline.org a part-time non-commercial voluntary group.
Enclosed are 5 sets of documents. Thinkhouse contacted info [at] irelandoffline.org (which is shared with a colleague John Timmons) initially on behalf of their client Imagine who were releasing a new broadband product. We did not ask to be put on further email distributions for Imagine or for anyone else.
Despite this, on Fri August 4th Jane McDonald from Thinkhouse sent an email promoting an initiative from Ben and Jerry’s. (See document No. 2) Ben and Jerry’s are a client of Thinkhouse. My reply to this unsolicited email is at the end of the document.
Jane McDonald replied to this (see document No. 3) and gave the excuse that there was some kind of slip and my email address was put into a personal circular. I would not consider it was a personal mail. Jane seems to suggest that Thinkhouse are aware of spamming laws.
On August 18th Thinkhouse PR sent me another mail, a press release for the mobile phone operator “3”. (See document no. 4. This document is the back and forth communication between myself and Thinkhouse PR.) At the top of the document is a communication from Jane McDonald telling me once again I’m off everyone’s list after I again requested it. Jane also admits to using my email address without permission to add me to their mailing lists.
On August 22nd (see document No. 5) Andrea Horan from Thinkhouse PR again sent me a PR, this time for another of their clients. This one for Moviestar.ie.
I wish for the Data Protection Commissioner to investigate this and carry out a prosecution if needs be. I am willing to travel to Dublin, I am willing to make a written statement and I am willing to testify in Court if the need arises. Thinkhouse PR is contravening the Irish Spam Legislation and it is totally disregarding my repeated requests to stop being sent information. I have also asked for my contact details to be removed from their systems and this has been disregarded too.
Please contact me on receipt of this complaint. Contact details are above.
Regards, Damien Mulley
Any Googlejuice I can give is given, especially if this helps bypass the apparent ban.
Update: Here’s the DPC’s ruling. The word “whitewash” comes to mind...
Another Update: Adam Lasnik posted a reply over on James’ blog explaining that the page’s disappearence was simply down to a bizarre coincidence caused by an update in Google’s search algorithms. Ok, it’s quite possible that what Adam’s saying is true, but I’ve sat through lectures on how Google’s search infrastructure works (see this video on BigTable for some details), and the only way I can think of that would cause this could happen is if there was some catastrophic data loss. Otherwise, all it should have happened was that the page might have dropped down the listings, which obviously didn’t happen. Very, very odd...
Addendum: Jane McDaid of Thinkhouse PR is quite an odd woman. She posted a comment on James’ blog stating that the DPC had “apologied (sic.) [to THPR] for having to follow the complaint up” and then, then, contradicts herself in a later comment on the very same post in a “clarification”, stating the DPC “did not apologise for having to follow the complaint up”. THPR don’t appear to be the brightest bunch.
1 On October 28, 2006 at 7:56, Revence 27 wrote:
(I’m running away from Textuality.)
Thing is, no matter what a society is like -- rich, intelligent, back-boned, or broke, dumb and amoebic -- nothing changes, if it is cursed with leaders. That’s all you need -- leaders -- and you have this kind of thing. They are all men, all the same.