What is going on with Ecademy?
Posted by: Daniel Vaughan in General, tags: ecademy, spamEcademy is a service I don’t really understand. I went to a few good Ecademy networking events in Bath once but as for the website it appears to be a poor man’s LinkedIn. Although some people seem to really like it to me it seems dated and confusing. It does not even have an entry on Wikipedia.
On a side note I always find it funny that it is run by Thomas and Penny Power. This reminds me of the Simpsons Episode where Homer changes his name to “Max Power” increasing his networking ability no end. Coincidence? Anyway apart from the old email inviting me to a seminar to learn about the power of social networking it rarely bothers me and I don’t really use it.
However when I woke up this morning I had several Ecademy emails inviting me to join Ecademy. I got one in each of my different email addresses including some I had forgotten about. The invite appeared to come from myself but with the email address <connecting.business@ecademy.com>. I also had several emails from people who had accepted my invitation.
I investigated further and apparently Ecademy had decided to send this invite email to all 800+ email addresses in my Gmail address book . It was sent at 23:10 when I was in bed and completely without my permission. I haven’t even looked at Ecademy for weeks, months even. I am really annoyed but I know there is no real point in complaining and can only apologise to all the people who got this invite. I will be closing my Ecademy account so there is no risk of this happening again. As far as I am concerned this spamming tactic is really nasty.
== UPDATE ==
I exchanged a few emails with Ecademy to work out what happened. In the end I got the following response from Glenn Watkins CEO of Ecademy:
Hi Daniel
After further investigation, an issue was found where the system had run a process which you should not have been included in, this is upsetting and not something we would ever do intentionally and I again apologise profusely. This hurts on many levels to see one of our members – and their connections – understandably upset because of this issue.
I confirm the issue has been fixed and that we are also now reviewing our policies, we will be implementing more notifications before we do anything with anyones details and data as it is rightly a sensitive area and one that we also value and respect enormously.
We have removed all email addresses and ensured your reminder setting is set to off, I am very sorry and want to thank you for your help, patience, understanding and professional communications.
I am pleased he admitted the problem and is doing something about it. There are many companies that would not even do that.










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