The American firm “Trip Advisor” has warned its customers that a significant part of its 20 million long email list of customers has been stolen.

It is trying to suggest to its customers that this is not too serious, since it doesn’t hold credit card numbers.  Yet in many ways this is not the main thing that worries people – it is the level of junk email.  Having your card number stolen is serious, of course, but in the end all you have to do is call the bank.   Stopping unwanted emails is much harder.

Most people value their privacy above all.  Indeed if you subscribe to the Education Marketing news service that runs alongside this service you may have noted my comment the other day about how not to write to people when you follow up hits on your web site.If you email a group of people it is possible to see which ones have then gone to your web site, and to extract this list and email them again.  (If you are interested in Hamilton House working with you on this, do let me know and I’ll be pleased to talk it through).

But, what many firms do is write to people and “personalise” the email by making it quite clear that they know the reader has been on the web site.

Generally this is a disaster and utterly turns people off.  Trust vanishes, because it appears to be an invasion of privacy.  Collecting the details of people who visit a web site is fine – and very helpful in your marketing.  Just don’t tell them!

A study from ExactTarget and CoTweet last year found that generally people start from the premise that their details are safe with the companies with whom they deal, until something goes wrong.   Play.com recently suffered a loss of data – and wrote to everyone to say “don’t worry”.  I am not sure what effect this has had on their sales, but I bet it was not positive.

TripAdvisor itself seems to have been very lax in its approach, since all its technical staff had access to all files – an ideal way to suffer a loss.  One disgruntled member of staff perhaps…

So the rule seems to be, people will trust your privacy arrangements until they have a reason to do otherwise.  Telling them that you are able to see if they have been on your web site is as bad a way to engender trust as is losing their data.

Tony Attwood 01536 399 000.   You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings