Clients of Roommate Service Report E-Mail Barrage

Radiate_Truth · Joined: 18 Aug 2007 Posts: 1056

January 20, 2003

Clients of Roommate Service Report E-Mail Barrage of Holocaust Revisionism
By DAVID F. GALLAGHER

Users of a well-known roommate-matching service in Manhattan say that after signing up with the service they began receiving e-mail messages from a Holocaust-revisionist Web site run by the service's founder.

Michael Santomauro, who started the Roommate Finders service in 1979, also runs a Web site called RePortersNoteBook.com that is critical of Jews and Israel, with headlines like ''How Kosher Is the Holocaust Story?'' Several users of Roommate Finders said similar material began landing in their electronic mailboxes soon after they gave their addresses to the service.

The e-mail messages were mostly articles taken from Web sites, including material from mainstream news outlets and sites that question historical accounts of the Holocaust. One message discussed the role of Jews in prostitution in the last century, while another concluded, ''The Hitler 'gas chambers' never existed.'' At the bottom of the messages were offers of related books in exchange for a donation, along with Mr. Santomauro's name and a link to his site.

Mr. Santomauro denied that he had knowingly added users' e-mail addresses to his RePortersNoteBook.com mailing list, which he said had more than 140,000 people on it.

''The bulk of my client base happens to be Jewish,'' he said, ''and I'm sensitive to that.'' He said he bought addresses from mailing list brokers and sold his customers' addresses to others. ''When I'm compiling or buying lists, there may be names that are overlapping,'' he said. The Roommate Finders Web site, at roommatefinders.com, says nothing about how the e-mail addresses will be used, only that personal information may be shared with prospective roommates.

Mr. Santomauro said he saw nothing wrong with sending such material to people who had not requested it as long as he gave them the option of removing themselves from the list.

''It's just an e-mail,'' he said, ''and you have the opportunity to unsubscribe.''

Some people who ended up on the list took a different view. Svetlana Lebedeva, 24, said that when she began receiving e-mail messages from RePortersNoteBook.com in October, she immediately made the connection with Roommate Finders, where she had recently signed up. ''Nobody asked for my permission to be on it, and something as absolutely outrageous as this, I shouldn't have been on it to begin with,'' she said. ''It was very disturbing.''

Another subscriber, Harla Rozner, 30, said she signed up with the service twice in the past year seeking roommates to share her Upper East Side apartment. Both times she began getting e-mail messages from RePortersNoteBook.com. ''I would open my mailbox and there would be tons of them,'' she said.

Ms. Rozner said that after she wrote to Roommate Finders this month complaining about the messages and asking to have her apartment listing removed, she received in response an article on Jewish slumlords, sent from a Roommate Finders' address.

John Mozena, a founder and vice president of the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial E-Mail, an advocacy group, said those examples show how Web users need to look for a site's privacy policy before turning over personal data.

''This seems like the best example I've seen yet on how not to use your customers' information,'' he said.

Roommate Finders charges $300 for access to listings of people with apartments to share, but adding a listing is free. The site says the service has had more than 217,000 clients, and lists dozens of companies and universities ''that put their trust in us,'' including American Express and Columbia University.

Mr. Santomauro said he was ''an amateur Holocaust revisionist'' who believes that the number of Jews killed by the Nazis has been overstated. He characterized his mailings as noncommercial because they asked only for donations. But he said the books he offered were generating more income than Roommate Finders, which he said has been hurt by a real estate slump.

SOURCE