| About InfoWorld : Advertise : Subscribe : Contact Us : Awards : Events : Store |
 |
||||
|
||||
 |
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
||||
|
|
|
||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 COLUMN
Readers don't buy eBay's claims that technical glitch resets preferences THE FUNNY THING about the Your Preferences page on certain Web portals is that they seem to suffer from a glitch that leaves the Y out. Many companies periodically reset their customers' preferences so that they are eligible to receive promotional e-mails, telemarketing calls, and the like. In particular, AOL has claimed the right to opt in its customers every year. eBay, however, appears to be taking another approach.
Cynics that they are, however, my readers seemed to feel that eBay might have other motives than correcting an obvious user error. "I purposely set my Notification Preference defaults to 'no,' because I get way too much [junk] as it is," one reader wrote. "You and I both know this is a silly, shameless, and insulting ploy to get my name on their e-mail and telemarketing lists -- 'ethically.' I felt like taking a shower after I read it." I wasn't the only one hearing similar sentiments from recipients of the message, as eBay found itself catching criticism in the press and on the Internet for it. The messages soon stopped, but within a few weeks eBay was sending out a different missive to another set of eBay account holders. "Late last year, eBay discovered a bug which affected the preference settings of new users who registered in August 2000," one message read. "The error prevented many new community members from receiving eBay e-mails regarding bid confirmation, outbid, and end of Auction notices ... [and] from receiving updates about special offers and events." Once again, the problem was resolved "quickly and efficiently" by resetting the members' preferences to the default "yes" position. Although the new message was at least a bit less sanctimonious, recipients still didn't buy eBay's explanation. "Who are they kidding?" one reader wrote. "They might as well be honest about it and just admit they're going to change our preferences back to opt-in every year, just like AOL does. I wouldn't even mind it that much if it wasn't such a long batch of preferences you have to reset. I'm just afraid I'm going to turn the telemarketing button on, which would be really annoying." "Now this strikes me as very suspicious," another reader wrote, referring to the new message. "A bug that only affected registrations in August? Did they detect it in September and only now get around to telling us? I'd be interested in finding out if anyone else got an e-mail like this and if the month changes from letter to letter." As a matter of fact, the months did change from letter to letter. I soon had copies of the same message from other readers, differing only in saying that a bug had occurred in May, in June, in July, or in October. eBay sure seemed to have a problem debugging its preferences page. According to an eBay representative, a bug was plaguing the system from April to November last year. "To be honest with you, we didn't discover it until about Labor Day, and it took about a month or so to develop a work-around." Newly registered users during that period all had their preferences in an identical pattern, regardless of the preferences they'd actually set," the representative said. Once the problem was fixed, eBay notified customers that their settings were being switched back to the default, which means the user is opted in for all communications. "Preferences that were affected by this process do not give eBay the right to sell or rent any of the information to third parties," the representative added. He also pointed that eBay gave members a 14-day moratorium on the promotional e-mails so that they'd have time to reset their preferences. Could eBay really go almost six months without even noticing that new users' preferences were all being set the same way? Before you decide, let me just add that this isn't the first time this has happened. About the same time last year, eBay sent out a similar message apologizing for a bug that had messed up preferences on new accounts and forced the company to reset them all to "yes." I don't know, but I think my preference would be for the AOL approach on this -- at least they've managed to get the bugs out. Got a complaint about how a vendor is treating you? Contact InfoWorld's reader advocate, Ed Foster , at gripe@infoworld.com.  RELATED SUBJECTS  Business IntelligencePortalsDiscuss this article in our online forums MORE > SPONSORED WHITE PAPERS 
SPONSORED LINKS
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
