The etiquette ends when the context is making money from a member. Then it is a sales transaction and there better not be any expectation of privacy. Why would you want to be disbarred from sharing communication from commercial entities this way? How are you or the society better served by providing such secrecy? Wouldn't the vendor be more ethical to you if they knew at any time you could share the communication in public?
Remember how many times you have heard that your communication with a customer service agent may be recorded and analyzed. That runs foul of your ethics, right? That your communication was only with that agent and not be shared with others. Yet it will be. For same reason, you have the right to share their communication with anyone you like.
Hi Amir,
I don’t see it quite as black and white.
I think there are plenty of shades of grey as well. Whether there are actually fifty, I don’t know – but there are certainly a few stages in between.
If a dealer or manufacturer contacts someone privately with a sales offer, sends promotional material, makes a specific offer, or otherwise approaches someone clearly and solely with a commercial intention, then I completely agree with you. In such a case, I would not assume that the communication deserves the same degree of confidentiality as a genuinely personal exchange.
But there are also many mixed situations in which the personal and the commercial can overlap.
Suppose I’m having a private conversation with Thorbjørn from
@SigbergAudio about which driver he might use for one of his subwoofers. During the conversation we happen to get onto the subject of Oslo, I mention that I may have something to do there, and I invite him to dinner.
Or suppose I’m chatting with Keith from
@Purité Audio because I’m in London and ask him what’s worth doing in his part of town. He then says: “Why don’t you stop by while you’re here and listen to some of the latest stuff? You can also compare GGNTKT directly with the AsciLab speakers.”
Or I’m talking to
@Duke about a particular loudspeaker component, and during the conversation he tells me that I can buy it from him – or gives me some advice on where else I might be able to get it.
The same could apply to you. Suppose I ask you privately about good restaurants around Seattle, and because you know that I was once interested in the AsciLab speakers, you happen to mention that I could also stop by and listen to them while I’m there.
In all of these cases, there is ALSO a commercial element somewhere in the conversation. Even so, I would still regard the exchange as mainly private. I don’t think the mere fact that one of the people involved makes a living from audio automatically turns everything said between two people into correspondence that can be made public.
For me, the important distinction therefore isn’t simply between commercial and non-commercial communication, but rather the context and the reasonable expectation of confidentiality. A direct sales approach is one thing; a private conversation between two people in which business matters also happen to come up is something else.
I also don’t think your comparison with recorded customer-service calls quite fits, although I don’t know whether the standards that apply in the EU, and particularly in Germany, are the same everywhere in the world. Here, companies MUST make it clear when conversations are being recorded and explicitly ask for permission if, for example, a conversation is to be used. If a company tells me that a conversation may be recorded and analysed, that normally means it may be used for certain internal purposes. But that certainly does not mean that the conversation may then be made public for everyone to hear or read. Internal use and broad public disclosure are two fundamentally different things.
But we don’t have to debate this down to the smallest detail, and you’re the boss around here – so your rules apply, and I respect them.
Best regards
