Yes 2 AV and privacy/mailing lists.

Some people are getting, with fair reason, concerned about their data privacy with the Yes campaign's mailing list. For the second time now we have received emails from the Labour Yes campaign, affiliated obviously with the Yes to Fairer Votes campaign but not necessarily an organisation we have signed up to receive information from.

Or have we?

Take a look at their privacy policy on the Yes to Fairer Votes website...

4. Marketing

If you have consented to receive marketing, we will use your information to send you marketing communications relating to Yes in May 2011 and carefully selected third party supporters, which we think may be of interest to you. We will only send marketing information by email or other electronic means where you have specifically agreed that we may do so.

You have a right to request that we stop contacting you for marketing purposes at any time. If you no longer wish to be contacted for marketing purposes, you can unsubscribe from Yes in May 2011at http://yestofairervotes.org/unsubscribe or by emailing ‪privacy@yestofairervotes.org

What is happening here is that Labour Yes are a third party supporter. What is not happening is your emails being given to Labour Yes. Labour Yes are providing an email to the Yes to Fairer Votes team to be distributed through the Yes to Fairer Votes marketing mailing list, as we've signed up to, ensuring that data protection is paramount.

Your email is never transferred to others, instead their email content is transferred to those you've given permission to use your email address for marketing purposes. Just because the "from" address says that it's from Labour Yes doesn't mean that individual has seen all of your email addresses. Nor does it mean they can email you for anything other than related purposes to the central Yes campaign.

It is irksome, of course, I'm not a Labour supporter and I dislike receiving Labour based messaging. Much more intelligent would be for Yes to Fairer Votes to have asked us what our party preference was when we signed up for marketing and to segment who gets sent emails. Even more "standard" would be for us to be able to opt in to the third party elements of marketing, such as the Labour Yes emails.

However the privacy policy is there, there are no data protection problems with it as it stands as your email is not provided to external bodies. And...relax.