* A hoo-ha at Novell product support forums
There was a bit of a hoo-ha last week when a number of participants in the Novell product support forums got e-mails that looked like they might be spam inviting them to access a survey. Seemingly, the e-mail originated from novell.com.
In fact, it was an e-mail that originated from Novell and it was a legitimate invitation to participate in a legitimate survey.
As it was explained to me by Novell PR maven extraordinaire Bruce Lowry, “Our knowledge management team is working with [Brigham Young University] to do a study on online communities. Since the support forums are online communities, we did tap participants in the forums to outreach to with e-mails for the survey.”
That seems reasonable to me. But what about the privacy policy? Bruce went on to say: “…we scrubbed the lists ahead of time to make sure that folks who had asked in any capacity not to receive communications from Novell weren’t included. My understanding is that an initial survey e-mail was sent out, plus one follow up reminder, and that’s it.”
Still, some people feel that their e-mail inbox (unlike their snailmail postal box) should be accessed only by invitation. So what do you tell these people, Bruce? “I imagine there will be people that take issue with this,” Lowry replied, adding, “Although I hope they understand the rationale in this particular case given the focus of the study. Obviously, participation in the survey is completely opt in.”
He reminded me that, “Because of the open nature of the support forums, we warn people in general that the information they provide when they participate in the forum is not private (https://support.novell.com/forums/faq.html). In fact, we give them advice on how to minimize the risk of their information being misused.”
Still, he did add: “Again, I can understand how some might take issue with Novell using the forum information pro-actively in the manner we did, but, I repeat, I hope they understand the rationale in this particular case. We’ll certainly keep this in mind going forward.”
No spam, no privacy invasion, no misuse of data. It’s a deserving project, and Novell is doing its best to both move the project forward and keep its users’ data private. Good job, Novell.
