When you go to the trouble of opting out from receiving a company's marketing stuff, you'd think it at least ought to stick for a while. That's why one reader was irked recently when he discovered that Chase was going to make him opt out yet again if he didn't want to get junk mail from them.
"A few months back I got a letter from my mortgage company, Chase Home Finance," the reader wrote. "I had previously filled out all the paperwork they sent me to tell them that I wanted to opt out of receiving all marketing material. So, I should not have received any marketing material, right? Wrong!"
The letter read:
As you may be aware, Chase and Bank One merged last year and have been working to bring the two companies together. We're very excited about the new firm's potential to present you with a broader array of products and services designed to help you achieve your financial goals. These products and services may often include private, unadvertised offers, customer-only discounts or special pricing features. However, our records indicate that you have requested not to receive marketing mail from us.
We'd like to start mailing you again. If you would like to receive mailing, including the offers described above, you don't have to do a thing. Please be assured that your decision to rejoin our mailing list will not affect any other choices you have made, such as request for us not to call you.
If you still prefer not to receive marketing mail from us, just follow the instructions below. Be sure to do so within 30 days. We hope that you'll decide to receive this mail from us, and as always, thank you for your business.
The instructions went on to give recipients a toll free phone number, e-mail address, or postage-paid returned envelope they could use to opt out. But, of course, the reader's problem was that Chase felt entitled to make him do this again, in spite of the fact they clearly knew he'd already gone through the process of telling them not to send him this kind of stuff. "As you can see, they are using the excuse of a merger with Bank One to revoke all opt out letters and basically tell me that they are going to start sending me junk again unless I again tell them not to," the reader wrote. "I know we see this a lot with online privacy statements and computer companies, but this is a big bank that should play by the rules."
Unfortunately, there actually are no rules to keep a big bank like Chase from making him opt out again and again, any old time they decide they're "very excited" about bombarding him with the same kind of offers he they didn't want before. And let's not forget about the CardSystems fiasco, where -- at just about the same time Chase was sending out these letters -- it made it crystal clear that it's much less excited about the idea of communicating with customers if it's about the possibility that your credit card information has been stolen by identity thieves. So unexcited, in fact, that Chase instead devoted its energies to arguing for the right to keep its customers in the dark. I guess when it comes to the privacy rights of customers, Chase believes that the bank is the only one that has the right to really opt out.
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