Voter.com to sell membership list

Industry Standard - The recently failed political portal Voter.com plans to sell a list of 170,000 e-mail addresses, complete with the party affiliations and issues of interest to people on the list, raising new concerns about the strength of voluntary privacy protections when companies go belly-up.
In an attempt to head off privacy concerns, Voter.com is requiring bidders to agree that they will use the list only to "provide personalized political news and information to the subscribers." That would be consistent with the former Web site operator's privacy policy, which said that if the company was sold, data about subscribers could be transferred only if it was to be used for that purpose.
A call to Voter.com's office in Washington wasn't returned.
Privacy advocates, however, complain that the sale of such sensitive information could easily result in misuse of the list. The loophole in the original privacy policy may keep Voter.com out of legal trouble, but subscribers could be in shock if the list is purchased by partisan political groups, they say.
"This takes many of the other sale-of-information issues to the next level," says Deirdre Mulligan, director of the University of California at Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. Political preferences are "highly sensitive," and a sale could easily allow the information "to go to people that subscribers would never have chosen to share it with, like people on the other side of an issue," she adds.
Jason Catlett, president of Junkbusters, notes that Voter.com is trying to sell the list to multiple buyers, which probably isn't what consumers expected if they had read the provision of the privacy policy covering a sale of the company.
"It's not what the average person would expect to happen," Catlett says. "It's another example of how privacy policies are usually a hopeless way to protect privacy because the consumer doesn't have predictable rights."
The e-mail address list doesn't include people's names and home addresses, though it does include other demographic data such as gender and home zip code.
In a description of the data offered for sale, Voter.com says the e-mail addresses were from people who subscribed to one or more of the site's newsletters. "The subscribers are identified by e-mail address and issue interest(s) and, in many cases, have additional demographic information associated with them that could include zip code (which allows segmenting by geography), sex and political party," the site says.
Political consultant Jonah Seiger, co-founder of Mindshare Internet Campaigns, says the sale of the list renews questions that many had