I was shocked to discover that Dun & Bradstreet (the corporate credit agency) harvests and sells e-mail addresses of businesspeople, without their permission. Thus I am getting spam (including in my company’s tech support queue) courtesy of a supposedly reputable company.

Worse, once they sell your address, it will likely be resold over and over, so there’s no way to stop the spam from rolling in, and like most vendors of peoples’ contact details, they don’t bother contacting the people they sold them to (for some reason that’s always your problem, not theirs).

Sadly it appears that this behaviour isn’t illegal in the UK (or EU), since our anti-spam legislation only covers consumers’ e-mail addresses.

Personally I think we should update our legislation such that companies that sell details on are required by law to contact their customers in the event that someone demands removal from the list they’re selling, and that customers so contacted are also then required to remove the information (whether or not it has been second sourced) unless they can prove that they have explicit permission.