
Ask HN: Is it legal to sell email list? - ryuta
I am wondering, how do sites like builtwith, adapt.io,prospect.io sell email lists of a company? Doesn&#x27;t it break GDPR rules?
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PaulHoule
There are major differences in the ethical standards of people who sell
mailing lists.

I've seen mailing lists that get crazy-high response rates (send 10,000 emails
and a few hours later you have $6000 worth of orders for plants).

I have also seen mailing lists that have some addresses that don't even have
an @ sign.

Empirically what will get you in trouble is having a list with a high bounce
rate. Bounces are a better signal of a bad list because the rate of spam
complaints is not very high (compared to the number of people who get spammed)
-- many people don't unsubscribe or send complaints because they are afraid it
will prove their email is valid and will get them more spam. Other people send
spam complaints because they hate you for other reasons.

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pmontra
IANAL, maybe it is legal even in the EU with GDPR but the buyers must get the
consent of the data subject before using the addresses. Unfortunately they
can't use the addresses to get consent because the data subject doesn't know
about them so they shouldn't get the addresses to start with.

It's probably the seller that has to get the consent to transfer the address
to that very buyer.

The idea is that the data are owned by the data subject and they lend them to
companies. They can ask if they can sub lend to somebody else. It's not polite
to lend a borrowed book without asking the owner, right?

