Free business cards? Think again...
You just may be sacrificing your personal contact information for 500 free or discounted business cards. Unless you enjoy junk mail in your home or office mail box, Junk e-mail, telemarketing phone calls, giving away detailed information on yourself and every important employee within your company for your competition or a headhunter to use maliciously may not be a good idea. Be sure to read the website's privacy policy completely. In this age of identity theft, giving up your personal information in order to save a few dollars on business cards really may not be in your best interest.
Here are some phrases that you may find on some online website privacy policies in the business card printing industry (and many other retail websites)
"After finalizing your order, you may have an opportunity to review third party products or services for purchase... Some of these products and services are offered and/or supplied by, independent companies. These companies are not owned or operated by us."
Basically this could mean that as soon as you click 'Confirm Order' on their website, they may sell or share your personal contact information. It's likely that the business cards you plan to purchase or have purchased won't even cover the cost of actually printing them. However, selling your personal information may reap large profits for the business card provider.
"Your contact information (name, email address, telephone number and/or mailing address) may be made available to carefully selected, reputable third-party organizations"
This phrase can be found on many retail websites. The translation for this sentence could mean: "You may receive a lot of unwanted emails, mail, and phone calls."
"Ads are served for us by a contracted, third-party advertising company. These companies may use a cookie or an action tag, also known as a Web Beacon or a 1 pixel .gif file to track your response to their advertisement. Our company does not monitor or exercise control over these cookies."
This means that you give permission to sell your contact information and your movements are tracked by these unknown advertising companies with your consent. Then you agree to a hold harmless statement saying they have no recourse to deal with it.
Some companies will issue statements such as the following which declare that they only "share" your information with other "trusted corporate partners." They may still be engaged in selling your information to them.
"Your contact information is only shared with our reputable corporate partners."
"We may share your contact information with trusted, reputable corporate partners. These partners operate under their own terms."
The residual effect here could mean that your information could in fact be passed along again and again. In the end, who knows where your personal information winds up!
We don't sell or share any of your information with anybody at all.
We don't plant cookies on your computer either.