Harshad Sharma has an email that he created with “Harshad Sharma” domain ID specifically for using it on Indian based online store Flipkart, but it seems that Flipkart maybe selling its customer base to spammers, in this case Gerald Online who claims to be the ‘Store of the World’s Biggest Jeweler’ in India. Its easy to add anyone’s email to any newsletter service without the approval from the users. This is a practice that many small time online retail websites do in order to make a buck, or maybe to lure in potential advertisers that they have a large subscriber base (in case of news or information specification sites) by leeching email addresses from different ways, but its surprising that a store like Flipkart is caught doing so.
In fact, it should also be noted that Tech2 added my personal email address in their mailing list where it kept on coming on my inbox despite marking it as ‘Spam’, an email address of which I doubt I’ve used to sign up on Tech 2 forums or anything related to the site, except maybe Chip Forums, which was taken down and transferred the user base to Tech2 after flushing out their older forum’s member base. It should also be noted that their unsubscribe option did not work, until I spammed in Tech 2’s Facebook page and pointed it out in their own ‘Ghost Town’ forum. Its concerning nevertheless that anyone is obtaining contacts and maybe even more information from places where we entrust our private information to places where we deem it to be trustworthy.
Currently, Flipkart seem to have contact Harshad Sharma via phone and told him that they’re looking into it.
This post will be updated as Harshad Sharma keeps the issue updated via Twitter.
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