Alma Mater Cursus Publici Quisquiliae A.D. 1088

On July 14, 2015, our spamtraps received a message advertising the Foodomics 2015 conference offered by the Università di Bologna. We wrote to them the same day, and have today received the following response from their privacy office. We see no other alternative but to list the mail server and domain name of this institution who defend the practice of sending Scientific Spam and violate their GARR agreements in doing so.

Spam:

Date: Tue, 14 Jul 2015 19:36:28 +0000                                           
From: International Conference on Food-omics <[email protected]>
To: International Conference on Food-omics <[email protected]>
Subject: FoodOmics 2015: First Announcement and Call for Abstracts              

We are delighted to announce the 4th International Conference on Foodomics - from Food to Life, which will highlight the latest research efforts in foodomics. The conference will be held in Cesena, Italy, from October 8 to 9, 2015!
Make sure to attend ICF2015, a meeting where scientists and industry professionals from all over the world will exchange of knowledge on the many interesting topics related to foodomics.

The deadline for Early Bird Registration is August 31st. Register now!

The deadline for Abstract submission is September 1st (for oral presentations) and 21st (for poster presentations).

All details on www.foodomics.eu

Submit your abstract, register your place and join us in Cesena!

Regards,

Conference Co-Chairs
Alessandra Bordoni & Francesco Capozzi

University of Bologna (Italy)

Response to complaint:

Date: Wed, 29 Jul 2015 09:31:56 +0000                                           
From: Privacy <[email protected]>
To: [us]
CC: International Conference on Food-omics <[email protected]>, Privacy  
        <[email protected]>
Subject: R: Scientific Spam: FoodOmics 2015: First Announcement and Call for    
        Abstracts                                                               

Dear ScientificSpam DNSBL Administration,

please kindly accept our sincere apologies on behalf of the Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna for any inconvenience caused and we appreciate your efforts in bringing the matter to our attention.

In compliance with the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and the Data Protection Code - Italian Legislative Decree no. 196/2003 we would like, however, to state that the purpose of the communication within the International Conference on FoodOmics is not commercial but responds only to academic institutional purposes (art. 4 of the D.R. 271/2009).

In particular, the International Conference on FoodOmics organized by the Department of Agricultural and Food Sciences - DISTAL of Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna is a dissemination event carried out for scientific research purposes.

As you requested, we verified how this address list has been built and if the emails contain a functioning “unsubscribe” mechanism. After checking, we have found that the mailing list was created basically from a long organizational activity of previous conferences that date back to 2005. The addresses were collected during all the conferences by providing the information note on the processing of personal data pursuant to art. 13 of Leg. Decree no. 196/03.
In addition, we have noticed that some email addresses have been collected from contacts of scientific journals deemed relevant to the topic of the conference. However, we are not talking about undifferentiated activity of scraping, since the treatment was carried out for the sole purpose of promoting research and to establish a possible collaboration in science with these contacts.

Finally, in compliance with art. 7 Leg. Decree no. 196/03, note that the persons to whom the personal data refers are entitled at any moment to obtain the confirmation of whether said data exists on record or not, to know the content and origin, to check the accuracy thereof and ask for them to be completed, updated or rectified.

Useful information for exercising those rights are published in the Statement of Privacy Policy (art. 13, Leg. Decree no. 196/03) available on the website of FoodOmics conference.
In addition, in order to avoid any kind of abuse and to grant the right of recipients to stop receiving emails and to revoke the registration directly from the mailing list, a mechanism of unsubscribe is also foreseen at the bottom of the email message. This operation has been carried out with diligence whenever required.

Best regards,

Privacy Office - Alma Mater Studiorum - University of Bologna

One thought on “Alma Mater Cursus Publici Quisquiliae A.D. 1088

  1. RocketScientist Post author

    Now spamming IEEE members with

    From: [email protected]
    Subject: CFP: Special Issue on "Crowd-sensed Big Data for Internet of Things
            Services" in Pervasive and Mobile Computing Journal (Elsevier)
    

    Sending IP listed, domain has remained listed ever since.

    Reply

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