I share this immediate reaction - I understand the allure of using databases
like these as well as contact management services that you upload your contacts
to. And while the activities that rapleaf.com undertakes seem OK if a little
intrusive done on a one-off basis the bulk nature certainly give me pause for
thought. It's like spam - one irrelevant email in my in box wouldn't bother
me even if I didn't like it particularly but when there are a lot of them it
changes the nature of your relationship with your email.

And the free nature of the services make them much worse. If the business model
is not about servicing you as a customer then it must be about using something
that you bring to them that they can sell to another customer. When it isn't
clear what that is I become very skeptical, good intentions aren't enough. Even
when privacy is talked about well (and rapleaf's privacy policy looks better
than many) the lack of an actual contract makes it unenforceable (and
consequently meaningless in the event of a merger or change of heart).

Organizations should think carefully before engaging in this sort of information
sharing (and investigation into their stakeholders' online lives). I think we
could find the same sort of backlash against this sort of practice as we have
seen in the past against the practice of selling donor names and addresses.
It's not what people expect you to do when they give you their personal details
- so if they find you have done so and it results in adverse consequences for
them (or if it just offends their sense of a right to privacy) they're going to
see it as a breach of trust, which is a hard thing to recover from.

Helen