What is opt-in?
30 June 2020
Like all other reputable email service providers, my employer has an opt-in based anti-spam policy. This sometimes brings up a question about what qualifies as permissible consent under our policy. While we definitely believe that our policy is clear enough, a few weeks ago, I decided to break down some ideas about permission, consent, and
I’m still here…
29 June 2020
An apology: I haven’t forgotten about the blog, and really haven’t neglected things so much as I’ve been super busy. Since my last post, I have: Overseen the transition of our team’s ticketing queue from one platform to another. Applied to the University of Houston Law Center’s part-time/evening program. (The next time that you are
Policy at scale: What makes an actionable complaint?
24 March 2020
Here’s something you may not know about abuse desks: they’re busy. The further up the “food chain” you get, the smaller the relative number of complaints you’ll see, but almost any abuse desk will receive at least several thousand complaints per year. Dealing with complaints, then, is somewhat art and somewhat science. There are questions
Policy at scale: Figuring reputational damage
19 March 2020
How important is policy? Policy not only reflects and is a product of reality. Policies are created as a reflection of what a company wants to do and how it will pursue its business. For some companies, that means “we will try to get away with doing no more than the law requires.” For others,
Policy Practicum: COVID-19
16 March 2020
How does general policy change in the face of a known health emergency? It’s a really tough question that can be fraught with pitfalls and emotions. So, this will be the very first of an intermittent series of posts covering the policy implications of things happening in real life. First, a disclaimer I feel the
Policy at scale: It both is and is not about the customer
16 March 2020
There’s an old quote sometimes (mis)attributed to Stalin: “The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic” (Wikiquote contributors 2020). The same thing holds true when it comes to policy enforcement: A single customer can be watched carefully but hundreds or thousands of customers fall to statistics. Mass detection
Policy at scale: The purpose of a policy is protection
12 March 2020
The purpose of a written policy is to protect the provider by protecting the customer. Stated policies — especially in written form — provide a baseline of expected behavior that other people on the Internet can look toward. So, customers, prospects, recipients, and other providers are able to see what standards apply to the use
Policy at scale: Understanding the issue
9 March 2020
One of the more difficult things to consider is how policies scale when you are talking about sending millions or billions of messages per day. But, being able to scale your policies to go along with your business is an important consideration. I generally operate with a rule of thumb that any direct complaint (where
Tulsi Gabbard performs a public service
5 March 2020
Back in August of 2019, the Tulsi Gabbard campaign (“Tulsi Now, Inc.”) sued Google after Google temporarily suspended the campaign’s Adwords account after the first Democratic Presidential Candidate Debates (Marinucci & Strauss, 2019). Earlier this week, in a move that should have surprised absolutely no one, the judge in the case threw out the lawsuit
Policy exists for business reasons
2 March 2020
We live in a politically polarized world. Everyone wants exactly what they want and will only take it exactly as they would like it. You only need to look at the 2020 US Elections to see that. The New York Times has a wonderful example of that from the left: The movement’s identity is based