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Michael says... Do Your Part Towards Online Privacy

Last Thursday, Eli Lilly and Co. disclosed that they recently messed up big time, however they didn't quite take responsibility for it. They apologized and called it a "programming error."  Some error!

Lilly had a service where users of its Prozac anti-depressant could sign up on the Lilly web site for automated e-mails reminding them to take their dose.  On June 27, Lilly sent an e-mail to the more than 600 users of the service, which mistakenly included the e-mail addresses of all of them in the header, for all the others to see. Kind of like what you see on forwarded jokes and the like, where the names / e-mail addys up top are often three times as long as the message.

Ever forward those? I'm not a big fan of that in the first place; sure I've read the "It's to let friends know I'm thinking of them" piece; if it were to me and maybe a couple of others, sure... but on frequent mass mailings, I don't buy that. Anyway, if you are going to forward e-mail to friends, do them a favor, if privacy matters at all to you: in order to NOT share their names / addys with thousands of others on subsequent forwards, use the "Bcc:" item for all instead of the "To:" You can reach your same "distribution," but each only has their own addy up top (along with the hundreds of others in the body of the e-mail unless you edit those out - please do, or copy and paste the message to a NEW e-mail). 

Besides privacy, which may not matter among a group of friends, but can in the subsequent forwarding, having those addys omitted may reduce the spam we all get. 

posted July 9 - August 10, 2001