Stop the spam from StopRailNow and ZeroShibai

by billso on Sunday, 15 June 2008

Malia Zim­mer­man and her fel­low trav­el­ers Cliff Slater and Charley’s Taxi pres­i­dent Dale Evans are busy pro­mot­ing the con­struc­tion of more roads and ele­vated HOV lanes on their remark­ably ugly web sites, as well as the abysmally designed honolulutraffic.com. The Hawaii Reporter has been email­ing sin­gle image mes­sages for an anti-rail group and a sis­ter web site, ZeroShibai.com.

‘Let the peo­ple decide’ not to receive spam

But there’s no unsub­scribe or opt-out link in email mes­sages or on their web sites. In 2008, that’s not just igno­rant — it may be ille­gal. So much for respect­ing the pri­vacy of Inter­net users. Malia seems more con­cerned about her First Amend­ment pro­tec­tion from civil law­suits than respect­ing user privacy.

Another peti­tion site, Let Hon­olulu Vote, has sim­i­lar prob­lems with design and privacy.

Per­haps Sto­pRail­Now could spend some of the money they are spend­ing on full-page adver­tise­ments in the Hon­olulu Adver­tiser, Star-Bulletin and Mid­Week on an email man­age­ment ser­vice like Safe­Sub­scribe.

I did send an unsub­scribe request to info@stoprailnow.com on 9 May 2008. It’s a very sim­ple mes­sage that folows the stan­dard pat­tern for unsubscribing:

billso\'s unsubscribe request to stoprailnow.org

I haven’t received a mes­sage from them since. But I didn’t receive any acknowl­edg­ment of my request, either. I remem­ber the days when the Hawaii Reporter’s web server was kept in a bed­room.

Laws, tech­nol­ogy and expec­ta­tions have changed since then.

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Tagged as: email, Honolulu, Oahu, privacy, rail, transit

  • http://dpeters1.myopenid.com/ Daniel Peters

    If going to col­lege has taught me any­thing, it’s to be skep­ti­cal of facts that are stated with­out any citation.

    After my trip back in time to the early 90’s to check out honolulutraffic[dot]com, i had a glance at the stoprailnow[dot]com site and was par­tic­u­larly intrigued by the fact that their “Why not rail?” page had many strong facts with nary a sta­tis­tic or foot­note to back it up.
    The site claims that rail is noisy; I invite them to try to watch a movie at my apart­ment on punch­bowl where Harley David­sons and fat-mufflered civics are abound and then tell me that rail is louder than traffic.

    Another fun tid­bit from sto­prail­now claims that rail will be tall and unsightly, com­plete with a lit­tle pic­ture of a none-too suave look­ing train of some sort. Their “Bet­ter Options” page then sug­gests that an ele­vated express­way is bet­ter. The pic­ture shows a stag­ger­ingly tall road. Contradictory?

    The way I see it, there is only so much more room to make roads. Build­ing more roads will make things smoother for a cer­tain period of time and it will only get peo­ple to buy more cars. Gas prices ris­ing will not cur­tail this as much as it will sim­ply change the type of cars that peo­ple buy. http://www.autoblog.com/2008/06/03/by-the-numbers-may-2008-f-150-falls-edition/

    In the end, I just want to know where sto­prail­now is get­ting its facts. “Most Oahu res­i­dents oppose this project.” It’s stated on the front page. I see no source. No source, no weight. That’s the way I see it.

  • http://billso.com billso

    I do press stu­dents to cite their sources, and I’m also glad you are read­ing with a crit­i­cal eye! Kudos to you.

  • http://billso.com billso

    [insert witty response here]

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