TRUSTe announced a partnership yesterday with Mailshell.com to monitor the e-mail practices of its privacy seal program members.
“We're providing the technology that will allow TRUSTe to conduct an e-mail monitoring and seeding program,” said Eytan Urbas, vice president of marketing at Mailshell.com, Santa Clara, CA. “What we do is enable TRUSTe to anonymously sign up for each licensee's list using a unique e-mail identity. Then TRUSTe can monitor the activities for each list and make sure they are compliant with the mailer's privacy policy.”
TRUSTe is a nonprofit online privacy organization that grants its seal of approval to Web sites with comprehensive, accessible and readable privacy agreements. Companies deemed worthy of the program must sign a contract with TRUSTe that ensures adherence to the approved privacy policy.
Mailshell.com is an e-mail management service that weeds out unsolicited messages from business-to-business lists and commercial opt-in e-mail.
According to Urbas, the two privacy firms previously had been looking to collaborate, and this partnership seemed to be a natural fit.
Using Mailshell's proprietary technology, TRUSTe can tell which of its members, if any, are violating their privacy policies and, therefore, their agreements with TRUSTe.
The technology also can identify members that sell or rent their e-mail lists, according to Urbas.
If a mailer is found by TRUSTe to be in violation of its privacy policy, Mailshell provides irrefutable proof of the violation through its unique e-mail IDs, he added.
