About six years ago, the "spam" law came into effect. Its name is derived from the foreign word SPAM, which literally means "flooding," "flooding with advertising material.".
The phenomenon of 'spam' has plagued the Israeli public for many years. This nuisance has grown and intensified over the years until the Israeli Knesset was forced to protect its citizens physically, outlaw it, and even impose heavy financial fines on violators.
'Spam' is a method of forced advertising and sales against the customer's will, phone calls to home and mobile lines, sales flyers in mailboxes, email boxes, and anywhere a person desires their privacy and defines it as their fortress.
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The harassment method was and still is sophisticated - companies specialized in collecting databases of phone numbers, email addresses and residential addresses and, with manual labor, segmented the details according to parameters of 'sector affiliation', 'economic status', 'ages', 'social status', and other precise segmentations. Thus, an importer who wanted to sell luxury strollers purchased databases of young, well-established families and reached exactly his target audience, an office furniture manufacturer who wanted to increase his profits bought a database of liberal professionals such as lawyers and accountants, and thus every commercial company in its field and target audience reached precisely the strategic fishing area with the help of the segmented database.
Over the years, to our detriment, without our knowledge, our personal information has been collected, cataloged, and commercialized, severely violating our privacy and violating our peace.
Do you have a Bar Mitzvah? Good to know
He lives in one of the central cities, and his eldest son has reached the age of bar mitzvah. Several months earlier, the excited father chose one of the prestigious halls, deposited a deposit, and saved the day designated for the bar mitzvah celebration for his beloved eldest son in the hall's calendar.
But in the weeks after placing the order, the happy father began to receive telephone offers, his mailbox was flooded with envelopes addressed to his residential address, with the common denominator being... all of them were of an advertising nature related to the future Bar Mitzvah celebration.
A floral designer who promised to turn the hall into a 'rose garden' for the price of admission, a promoter who offered an orchestra with nine musicians in a 'pay for six, get three for free' promotion, a production company that promised panoramic photography and a video that would be etched forever, a printer who talked about printing an invitation that 'no one will forget to come''
And the owner of the joy....he doesn't know where all the professionals related to his joy and in general....are emerging and appearing before his eyes. Where do they get their information about his firstborn son who is going to shoulder the burden of Torah and commandments?.
The phone calls and letters never stop for a moment... a luxurious kosher hotel for a groom's Shabbat on an 'all-inclusive' basis, catering that offered to hold the magnificent 'Kiddusha Rava' on earth, like King Solomon's feast in his time, and charitable and benevolent organizations that offer a 'meal for the poor' at rock-bottom prices.
And when he realized that the disturbing publicity was not the result of chance, but rather someone's hand was at work, he began a thorough investigation, and in the end... all traces led to the luxurious office of the owner of the lovely hall.
It turns out that he was entrenched in an agreement with the 'Magarim' company, which dealt, among other things, in the segmentation and sale of 'party organizers', and outside of his occupation as a hall owner, the crook benefited from commercializing the names of his clients who booked an event in Olmo.
So before you sign a contract and decide between chicken in date honey or beef in a young marinade, before you decide whether the cabbage will be in a sunflower or cranberry and sprout mixture, pay attention to the clause in the contract that will prohibit the owner of the hall from passing on your names, event details, or making any private or commercial use of your personal information.
• The column is published in the press line
