Fastmail admits to sharing user email addresses with third party

Last week a user (ferrety) of the forum emaildiscussions.com started a post that accuses Fastmail, an Australian email hosting provider of giving out their email address to a third party without permission.

The post reads: Fastmail gave out my main email address to a survey company without permission. I had made a point of not giving out my main email address to anyone. The only company that had it was Fastmail (obviously).
This morning I received mail at that address from surveygizmodo on Fastmail's behalf.

So the main email address & login for my account that I was keeping secure is now known to an American survey company & heaven only knows who else.

While many users on the thread have the stance that is over reacting, As user Chuckster pointed out here:

As stated from your privacy policy.
"Data mining and profiling
We do not sell or give information about our users to any third parties."

You lied to your business customers.

Response from Fastmail CEO here stats that is too intensive to build a survey tool in house:

The reason we chose to use a third party rather than building a survey tool inhouse was entirely around skill and time - it would have taken us inordinately long to build the tooling ourselves as opposed to paying experts to do it. We chose SurveyGizmo because they have a good privacy history, and provide tooling to allow non-programmers to extract useful data from the surveys.

In response to the complaint we received today, we are reviewing how we choose users to survey, and plan to require an opt-in of some sort.


Regards,

Bron (CEO, FastMail Pty Ltd)