I have received FOUR obnoxious SPAM emails from Royal-Palace (various email addressed). They were sent to an email address which I have used only at your Web site.
SHAME
I have received FOUR obnoxious SPAM emails from Royal-Palace (various email addressed). They were sent to an email address which I have used only at your Web site.
SHAME
As far as I can see you have as many as 14 other Geni users in your family group and if you have not removed the option for them to see your email (check http://www.geni.com/account_settings/permissions) you might have the leak there.
I doubt that you can guarantee that none of them ever have had a virus or similar on their PC.
I note that YOU did not guarantee that Geni.com did not sell my email address.
I am just a voluntarily curator on Geni, not an employee, so I cannot answer on their behalf.
I can however ensure you that there would have been a lot of fuzz both in the discussion forums and public media if Geni with around 7 million users had a leak..
I would recommend to start by checking your own PC and ask your family members to do the same, and I would recommend to use the online scanner from my favorite anti-virus since there always is a chance that a virus on a PC have knocked out an installed AV: Run ESET Online Scanner
I really doubt, but cannot prove, that this is a leak from me or my family members. It is not an address which they or I use. It was only used as the email address I gave to Geni.com. Can any other member of the discussion group make such a claim? Seems VERY fishy to me.
You asked if Geni are selling email addresses, - the answer is of course no.
I suggest you also read the terms and help section your find a link to on every Geni page: Terms, Help
Evidently not an isolated issue as Bjørn suggested it may be. There are at least three bug reports, and comments with from several people receiving the same set of spam.
Got spam on an address dedicated to Geni... and the "let family view my e-mail address" option is OFF.
However, I believe it when you say Geni doesn't sell addresses. Why? Because I've only gotten the one "family" of spam, from that one spammer. If Geni was selling the address, I'd expect a much wider variety. It seems like it was a leak of some kind, but a very small one.
(And as for leaks through viruses on customer computers... did all the people reporting this get the *same* virus, and only that one? And the virus writer is ethical enough to use the addresses gleaned only for this one set of spam?)
We have done a full review and our technical team did not find any exploits or evidence of exploits.