E-mail from Leisure Centre but including other members email addresses

I joined a local lesiure centre a number of months back and the normal questions were asked, name address, phone and email. I don't usually provide my email but obviously did in this case as i'v received a notification of classes coming up.

However, the e-mail I was sent wasn't just sent to me it was sent with a list of other peoples names and their workplaces in some cases eg. mary Carney@hse. and tom doran@itcarlow (NOT ACTUAL EMAIL ADDRESSES) and my full email address which is my full name.

As i said I dont' usually provide my email address but is it the norm for to include details of peoples email addresses etc. I don't like the idea of thirty odd people whom I don't know now having my email address, before I ring the leisure company to get them to take me off of their email list I would like to know if it's the norm thanks.

It is not the norm, sounds like it has breached the data protection act (at some level). Probably a mistake on the behalf of the centre.

I would contact them, but wouldn't be overly concerned by this.

Its far from normal in responsible organisations who treat customer data with the sensitivity it deserves.

They may be in breach of data protection legislation - [broken link removed]

Tell them to use BCC in future.

When it comes to the internet, people aren't as anonymous as they think. If I do a find all posts from Cashstrapped, I can get loads of info about their personal life. It wouldn't take too much to do cross referencing to other sources to build up a complete profile.

Then there is facebook, twitter, location services, skyhook etc, etc... out there. All gathering information.

Bit of a disaster, your email could easily be used by spammers etc. You should contact the centre and suggest that they attend some training on email marketing, newsletters, email etiquette. I can suggest a good one!

This has also happened to me in the past - generally I find it is with someone who doesn't realise how they are exposing people's details by including all the email addresses in the to field.

I usually reply back to the sender telling them that they should use the BCC area to send emails to multiple addresses as it protects everyone from the potential of the list being used inappropriately.

If you want to really get up their noses, click 'reply all' and explain their error to everyone.

Nue Blue did this recently and then sent out a mail apologising and giving everyone on the list a 15% discount.