There is one more commercial opt-out service to laugh at explore. At around the same time the Green Preference Service was launched another service appeared: i-allow.com. Like the GPS, the company was created by a self-professed "reformed marketer" (Justin Basini) and the company's business model was a variation on what the GPS was doing: they promised to stop junk marketing but really tried to get people to opt in to receiving specific types of adverts. And, as with the GPS, the business model didn't work. The service was pretty much dead and buried by 2013 and they quietly let the domain name expire in 2014.

The above screenshot of the website's home page, taken in September 2011, pretty much sums up what ALLOW was about. You could use the website to stop junk marketing and get deals you really want. In a nutshell, the website promised to give you a "reset button" for junk marketing and it was hoping they could then become the middleman between you and advertisers. To lure people in you could earn money by opting in to receiving adverts. For instance, you could indicate that you are interested in mobile phones, and if ALLOW could sell that information to advertisers a small amount of money would be added to your ALLOW balance.

Opting out (the reset button)

Before we get to bit about using your personal information in rewarding ways we should look at how you could take control of your personal information. The service could help you register with the MPS, TPS, Royal Mail's Door-to-Door Opt-Out, the eMPS and the for-sale copy of the electoral roll. Of these opt-outs the eMPS is a bit of an oddball; it is an American opt-out for marketing emails from companies based in the USA and has never been regarded as a viable solution to the spam problem. Perhaps a better candidate would have been my favourite opt-out service: the Your Choice Dummy Scheme. Chances are ALLOW wasn't aware of its existence.

Exactly how the opt-out process worked is unclear. In the case of the eMPS and the electoral register they simply explained how you could opt out, and for the Door-to-Door Opt-Out they would ask Royal Mail to send you an opt-out form, in the same way Junk Buster did. ALLOW appeared to claim they could register your details with the MPS and TPS but this is unlikely. The DMA rarely allows third-party registrations and there is nothing to indicate ALLOW had a special arrangement with the DMA.

Data protection notices

The marketing databases section is more interesting. You could send a data protection notice to 11 list brokers (Acxiom, Callcredit Marketing Solutions, Dataforce, Data Location Group, Eclipse Marketing, Equifax, Experian, Integrated Marketing, GB Group, Indicia and Occam). This was an excellent idea (credit where credit is due). Companies that want to send unsolicited mail typically buy data from list brokers, which makes stopping list brokers processing your personal data for "direct marketing" purposes very effective. Allowing people to contact all major list brokers in one go is even better.

Unsurprisingly, the list brokers weren't very enthusiastic about the one-stop-shop for contacting them. Shortly after I tried the option I received this email from Acxiom:

We have received an email that appears to have come from your email account. We have determined that it has in fact been sent from a third-party website that does not require your email password. The email is requesting that we suppress your name and address on our database. We are receiving a number of these requests, some of which have been sent without the email owner's knowledge.

At Acxiom, we take consumer data privacy extremely seriously and ensure we have been given permission to use the data we hold for marketing purposes. You have the right to change your mind about use of data at anytime, and we respect that right.

In order to fully protect your interest and ensure we have fully understood your instruction, particularly when we receive a blanket request via a third-party organisation, we do need to be able to verify your details to ensure we make the changes to the right person's data. Equally, we may not hold your details, or your details my already be suppressed via existing industry suppression files.

To help us action your request it would be helpful if you could provide the following information:

• Verify that you have requested for Acxiom to suppress your details within our database and confirm that you understand this request will override any previous consent given to receive information for marketing purposes.
• Confirm your full name and address, including postcode.
• Advise us of any specific marketing communication you have received that may have prompted you to take this action.

At Acxiom we continually look for ways to improve the relevance of communications to consumers held in our database and maintain a positive customer experience. It is important for us to know when this does not happen so we can address it with our clients, the brands that use our data for marketing communications.

When you confirm your wish to unsubscribe from receiving marketing material we will suppress your details immediately.

Clearly, they were not happy with the third-party requests. I did reply to the email and explained that I didn't have any specific examples of marketing communications because I didn't have a clue which list broker was selling my personal data to which junk mailer. They didn't reply.

A reset button?

All that said, ALLOW's claim that it let you protect your privacy and stop junk marketing was a bit of a stretch. Registering with the MPS and TPS can be useful but there are plenty of companies that ignore the opt-out schemes. That is particularly true of the MPS, which is a voluntary industry scheme. The same can be said of the Door-to-Door Opt-Out, which at best halves the amount of leaflets you get.

Still, the reset button wasn't completely useless. With the exception of the eMPS all the options on offer helped reduce junk marketing. It just wasn't going to eradicate junk mail. Unaddressed junk mail is pretty much unstoppable, and addressed junk mail is often the result of organisations tricking you into consenting to receiving junk mail. The data protection notices sent to list brokers were very useful but to really stamp out addressed junk mail there should also have been an option to send data protection notices to individual junk mailers.

Opting in

Of course, the whole point of ALLOW was to use your personal information in rewarding ways (the clue is in the name). However, you could use ALLOW to simply reduce junk marketing — there was no requirement to opt in to anything. They did encourage you to opt in to stuff but it wasn't to difficult to say "no". For instance, when you created an account you were asked what type of consumer you are. I am a marketing refusenik, and so, in the below screenshot, I am the person in body armour holding up a shield. The other three types of people all welcome adverts in various degrees. The default option was the picture of the woman holding two shopping bags — she finds it important to release information about herself so that she can sit back and get tailored offers.

Regardless of the option you selected you could next "build your ALLOW profile". We are now getting into Postal Preference Service territory. The page was a lengthy lifestyle questionnaire and the data was obviously used to monetise your personal data. All the questions were optional, so if you only wanted to opt out you could simply leave all the questions blank.

After creating your account you would be presented with your ALLOW dashboard. Here, you could opt out of junk marketing and submit even more lifestyle data.

The verdict

From what I can tell ALLOW got a fair number of users early on. Ultimately, though, the business model didn't work. I suspect few people opted in and that few advertisers signed up. The company tried adding various other services after it launched, such as "Internet Browser Security" (which, if I remember correctly, was just a Norton Internet Security subscription) but ultimately the business model just wasn't viable.

As per usual, the website was quietly taken offline. The last tweet went out in February 2013 and the domain registration expired about a year later. No announcement was made and the founder simply stopped talking about ALLOW on his blog (the ALLOW website insisted Justin Basini is a popular blogger). Users were not told what happened with their data; the service was just left to rot until the domain name was up for renewal. That is not impressive for a company that claimed organisations and businesses that use people's data should be completely open and honest about how they use people’s data and for what purpose.