Pop-ups and Spam Email Ethical Judgement

Pop-ups and Spam Email Ethical Judgement

Introduction:

Only two things are certain in this life, death and taxes.

I beg to differ. Seems to me we can throw spam and pop-up advertisements in there as well. In recent years, spam and pop-ups have become a way of life. People spend hours of their day weeding through their emails to find which ones are spam and which are the ones they really want to see. And it seems like any webpage you go to nowadays, an animated/flashing pop-up window appears, trying to get you to buy something.

Most everyone hates spam and pop-up advertisements. Doing some observational research, I noticed that when people visit websites with pop-ups, they tend to become frustrated and attempt to quickly close the pop-ups window. Personally, I don’t like pop-ups because they never have pertain to anything I’m interested in, and even if they did, I wouldn’t trust an advertisement that is blaring in my face when I’m attempting to do other work that is totally unrelated. I asked others how they feel about pop-ups, and I got some interesting responses. One person said, “I don’t even consciously think of them anymore. It’s almost like second-nature; when I visit a webpage, without thinking I find the little X in the corner of the pop-up window and close it as fast as possible.”

I found the same mentality toward spam messages and emails. A fellow classmate told me that he receives on the order of 200 spam emails every single day. That’s mind-blowing! I thought my 25 per day was bad enough. It got to the point where he needed to create a new email address for important emails, and just empty the old one out everyday. The problem he faces is that if one or two of those 200 emails are ac...

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...ps and spam emails forever.

References:

Apryl Duncan, Pop-Ups: Annoying But Good , 2003, About Advertising, January 2003,

http://www.advertising.about.com/library/weekly/aa012803a.htm.

Carl Sullivan, E-mail, Ad Blockers Pose Problems for Publishers, 2003, Editor & Publisher, 5 May 2003,

http://www.mediainfo.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1894258.

Thomas Ordahl, STOP THE POP (UP): The Problem with Internet Advertising, 2004, The Direct Marketing Association, 7 April 2004,

http://www.the-dma.org/cgi/dispnewsstand?article=2111+++++.

Jeffrey Utech, The Ethics of Pop-Ups, 2 October 2003,

http://jeffrey.theutechs.com/blog/archives/000743.html.

Peter Landau, Earthlink Upgrades Spam, Pop-up Blockers, 2003, Editor & Publisher, 30 May 2003,

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1898583.