Contact Macy's Now!

Tell Them to Respect Your Privacy

(Issued: June 5, 2001 / Expires: June 30, 2001)

Send a letter now to Macy's (Federated Department Stores, Inc.) to tell them not to "share" your personal information without your express permission.

Macy's Data Sharing Practices Threaten Your Online Privacy:

DID YOU KNOW that if you use Macy's bridal services, Macy's and WeddingChannel.com (the company that operates Macy's bridal registry site), may share with their affiliates your:

name, birth date, and credit card number;
address, zip code and phone number;
interests, age and email address

DID YOU KNOW that they may also share information relating to your wedding and guests such as:

dates and places of festivities such as rehearsal dinner;
dates and place of the wedding and reception;
names, addresses and phone numbers of your wedding guests;
information relating to your gifts and honeymoon.

DID YOU KNOW that they believe that they should be able to share this information with anyone, unless you affirmatively "opt-out" of their system?

Businesses and civil liberties organizations are engaged in a battle over how much privacy you should have online and off. Right now the battle lines are over opt-out versus opt-in. Opt-out means that businesses are generally free to use, share, trade or sell any personal information they have about you unless you have told them that they cannot. The burden is on the consumer to tell businesses that permission is denied. Opt-in means that businesses must ask consumers first before the business can use any personal information about the consumer. The responsibility is on the business to get the consumer's consent. Not surprisingly, businesses & marketing trade associations spend millions ever year advocating and lobbying for weaker privacy protections, such as opt-out, for consumers.

Macy's privacy policy also uses opt-out instead of the more protective opt-in. We believe that such sensitive personal information about your and your wedding guests deserves better protection.

Information such as this is very personal in nature and deserves better protection than an opt-out program can give. EFF staff attorney Deborah Pierce warns: "Individuals oftentimes have no idea how extensively their personal information is shared once a company has it, nor do they know what protections are available to them. Opt-out procedures are often buried in a privacy policy, and even if people understand that Macy's is keeping information on them, they have no understanding of just how far that information can travel under the auspices of 'sharing' among marketing affiliates. Here, we see information entrusted to Macy's ending up at American Express and ESPN - something that probably surprises most brides and grooms."

Macy's is the largest chain owned by giant conglomerate Federated Department Stores (FDS). The data collected about you by Macy's could well be pooled with data from, and shared among, all of the other chains run by FDS, such as Bloomingdale's, Bon Marché & Fingerhut, as well as with credit card companies and infotainment corporations. Your viewing and spending as well as dressing habits are becoming an open, combined and cross-referenced book to massive commercial enterprises who make additional profit by selling & trading your personal information rather than respecting you as a customer. Show them its time to change their ways!

What YOU Can Do Now:

Mail the EFF letter below to Macy's today. Feel free to use this letter verbatim, or modify it as you wish; it will likely have more weight the more it reflects your own words and feelings. Let Macy's know you do not appreciate your personal information being shared without your permission. Please be polite and concise, but firm.
Examine the privacy policies of Web sites that you visit. Most of them will have an opt-out process you can follow. Opt out!
Write your representatives in Congress and your state legislature to urge them to adopt strong, opt-in privacy protections for personal information. For legislator contact information and instructions, see:
http://www.eff.org/congress.html
Join EFF! For membership information see:
http://www.eff.org/support/

Sample Letter to Macy's:

Use this letter to Macy's or modify it, and send to:

Federated Department Stores
Privacy Master
P.O. Box 8215
Mason, OH, 45040

To whom it may concern:

As a Macy's/FDS customer, I write to demand that you immediately cease sharing the personal information that I give to you, in the process of purchasing products from you, unless and until I give my affirmative consent. This behavior is not what I expect from a company like Macy's. I'm particularly concerned because companies that you share my personal information with turn around and share my same information with many others.

Data-mining my information in this way dramatically increases the number of companies that have access to personal information about me, and my friends and family. For instance, I have learned that if I register with your bridal registry service, you share the information with entities such as the WeddingChannel.com and Bloomingdale's. The WeddingChannel.com will then share my information with magazines, publishers, travel & credit agencies, mass media outlets and others, each of whom in turn will sell me out to yet more marketers.

The information you collect is very personal in nature. This includes my name, address, email, phone number, credit card number, zip code, age, interests, and birth date. Of course my "interests" could include extremely personal information, as well as information that I would just not be interested in sharing with all of those companies. And I am appalled that you would "share" my wedding date and information about my wedding guests and family. And you didn't even warn me, or any other your other customers. This is no way to conduct business.

I do understand that your Privacy Policy provides a procedure I can follow to supposedly "opt-out" of your data sharing practices. However, it should not be my burden to find and correctly use your "opt-out" processes, and doing so is effectively meaningless since many other companies will have already received my information without my permission, ultimately from you. Since Macy's is seeking to benefit from the information I give you in trust, you should ask me first (opt-in), rather than blindly presuming my consent has been given (opt-out). If I don't agree, or if I don't respond, the presumption must be that I've denied consent.

As an individual concerned with my privacy offline and online, I demand that you change to an opt-in policy, or you stand to lose my business. That includes ALL Federated Department Stores chains, as listed at your www.federated-fds.com website.

Ask for my permission first before using my personal information -- it's that simple.

I look forward to hearing back from you about whether Macy's, and FDS as a whole, plans to change its data sharing practices to better protect my personal information.

Sincerely,

[Your name]

Privacy Campaign:

This drive to contact Macy's/FDS about their data sharing practices is part of a larger campaign to highlight how extensively companies and governmental agencies share and use your personal information online, and what you can do about it. Once or twice per month EFF will expose the data sharing practices of a company or governmental agency on the EFF website, along with a letter that individuals can send to company or governmental agency demanding that privacy be respected. The campaign will continue throughout the summer.

Check the EFF Privacy Now! Campaign Web site regularly for additional alerts and news:
http://www.eff.org/privnow/

For additional background and information on online privacy and data-sharing, see:

EFF Topics: Privacy
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/

EFF Top 12 Ways to Protect Your Online Privacy:
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/eff_privacy_top_12.html

Privacy Rights Clearinghouse (PRC)
http://www.privacyrights.org

Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC)
http://www.epic.org

About EFF:

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is the leading civil liberties organization working to protect rights in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF actively encourages and challenges industry and government to support free expression, privacy, and openness in the information society. EFF is a member-supported organization and maintains one of the most linked-to Web sites in the world:
http://www.eff.org

Contact:

Deborah Pierce, EFF Staff Attorney (Privacy)
dsp@eff.org
+1 415 436 9333 x106

Will Doherty, EFF Online Activist / Media Relations
wild@eff.org
+1 415 436 9333 x111

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