Findability? NO!

Aw snap! There’s no pretty picture!

Did that get your attention? I hope it did. Because this is important, so I hope you will read it. It is regarding our Etsy accounts – it doesn’t matter if you’re a seller or just a buyer over there.

You may have received an email about “An important message about a new feature and our Privacy Policy”. It has this bit in it:

…Right now it’s hard to find people you know on Etsy, and that’s sad. Well, we’re changing that. We’re making it easy to connect your email address book to Etsy, so we can find people you know who are also members.
(If you don’t want people you know to be able to find you, you will be able easily to opt out through your account privacy settings.)
We’re letting you know about this in advance, and will be launching this feature in mid-February.
We have also revised our Privacy Policy in anticipation of this feature. You can review our Privacy Policy here: http://www.etsy.com/policy/privacy

I want to urge you to go, no RUN, over to your Etsy account right now and change the settings for ‘Findability’ – it’s the bottom part on this page.

This thing is wrong on so many levels! First of all, it’s “sad” (aww, diddums!) that you can’t find people you know on Etsy?! Really? How about asking them? Friendly email? “Yo, dude, are you on Etsy?” Also, some people use a separate email for their, you know, Business, than they use with their friends.

This feature (I use the term loosely) should have been opt-IN, not opt-OUT. Because how about people who join later and don’t realise that they are opted-IN?

And seriously, I don’t want a third party to poke around with my email contacts, no matter what reason and I can imagine this ‘feature’ being a gateway to spam the heck out of my friends – which is bad enough, But imagine that you are using a business email with your Etsy account and all of a sudden those contacts get inundated with all sorts of email that they have no interest in.

This is starting to feel more and more like Fakebook (which I left last year), and in my opinion that is bad. There are many more important things that need fixin’ on Etsy.. mining for people’s contacts should not even be on the to-do list!

*sigh*

Anyway, as I said, RUN over and change the settings in Findability – because guess what? It is already live despite the email saying ‘mid February’ – so if people don’t realise it, that’s a good 2 weeks where Etsy can scoop up info under the radar. Great huh? Change the setting to NO.