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| October 2004 | The
Monthly Newspaper of the NYSSCPA |
Vol.
7, No.13 |
NYSSCPA Does Not Sell Membership Information
By James A. Woehlke, Esq., NYSSCPA Counsel
You have undoubtedly received unsolicited e-mails advertising some product or other. So have I. And you have wondered how the advertiser got your contact information. Again, so have I. Some Society members have expressed the belief that the Society had sold their information to these advertisers. This is most emphatically not the case.
Several years ago the Executive Committee refused to permit the sale of membership lists, thereby foregoing a significant source of non-dues revenue enjoyed by many other professional societies. The committee deemed member privacy more important.
About the same time, however, the Executive Committee also decided to make an online membership directory available to the general public. This membership directory is conveniently accessible through the “Find a Member” option on the homepage of nysscpa.org.
There are specific disclosures when using the “Find a Member” feature that forbid the user from exploiting the information for commercial purposes. Nevertheless, if a vendor is persistent enough, it can harvest contact information from this website feature and use it inappropriately. Whenever we learn of a business contacting members and improperly claiming a Society or Society-website connection, we promptly notify them that they must cease and desist.
It is the Society’s objective to take all necessary precautions to protect the confidential information of its members. The Society abides by this policy decision, refusing to make its mailing list directly available even to affinity vendors. Whenever an affinity vendor wants to send Society-approved advertising to the membership, the vendor sends the advertisements to a mutually agreed-upon, third-party mailing house. The Society separately makes mailing labels available to the mail house, only after obtaining a confidentiality agreement forbidding the mail house from any other uses of the confidential information. The Society stands on the principle that its membership information is solely to be used on a case-by-case basis, for preapproved commercial purposes.
