As my experience with Junk Buster had shown, an application that simply fires off opt-out emails to lots of opt-out services doesn't really work. The emails are likely to be ignored, and with opt-out schemes for unaddressed mail there is the added problem that deliverers might forget you have opted out. While I was thinking about how Junk Buster should maybe become a proper "junk mail manager" a new one-stop-shop for opting out appeared: Stay Private.

When Stay Private launched, in June 2010, I was a little annoyed. I had spent so much time banging the drum about everything that was wrong with opt-out services for junk mail and I had at least made some progress making the system work better for junk mail haters, and then Consumer Focus Labs comes along with its own Junk Buster. Consumer Focus, which was a non-departmental public body, had never shown any interest in the junk mail issue and now they were suddenly running a competing service, without even consulting me (I could have given them lots of tips).

The truth, though, was that Stay Private was clearly superior to Junk Buster. Stay Private let you actually register with up to three opt-out services run by the DMA in one go (the services were the Telephone Preference Service, Mailing Preference Service, and Baby Mailing Preference Service). You simply entered your personal details, selected the services you wanted to register with, and Stay Private did the rest.

Technically, this was rather smart. A Stay Private bot would visit the opt-out websites and fill out the forms, and it would report back to Stay Private. You never even saw the email with the confirmation link you need to click to complete your registration with the MPS or TPS — Stay Private managed that for you. And the service would also queue opt-out jobs when the website was busy, as it was in the first 36 hours after its launch.

How did the DMA feel about all this?

You might be wondering why the DMA allowed the Stay Private bot to submit opt-out registrations. They were rather upset about Junk Buster sending opt-out requests and now they had a bloody bot actually registering people! They could easily have blocked the bot's IP address.

I quizzed one of the Stay Private developers about this — I visited the (very fancy) Consumer Focus Labs office in late 2010 — and they explained they had met with the DMA a few days before launching Stay Private. The DMA didn't like what they were doing but there was nothing they could do to stop them. The thing is, it is easy enough for the DMA to ignore a single junk mail campaigner. But this was Consumer Focus, which at the time was a government-backed consumer champion. Its mission was to give a strong voice to consumers on the issues that matter to them and to work to secure a fair deal on their behalf. The fact that Consumer Focus had identified marketing opt-out schemes as a problem area was rather embarrassing for the DMA, and adopting the usual bullying tactics would only have made things worse.

The end of Stay Private

Stay Private got a bit of revamp in January 2011 — the most notable change was that they added support for the Corporate Telephone Preference Service and Fax Preference Service. However, by this time the service was already on its last legs. In October 2010, just four months after the launch of Stay Private, the Government had announced the details of its review of public bodies, which is better known as the bonfire of the quangos. Consumer Focus would be scrapped and services such as Stay Private would need to find a new home.

That new home was Stop Junk Mail… and, it was me who killed off Stay Private. One of the developers told me in late November 2012 that Consumer Focus Labs would be scrapped on 1st January 2013. I was invited to apply to take over the website, which I did. I inherited both the website and the domain names, but unfortunately not the database — at the very last moment Consumer Labs got cold feed about handing over a large amount of personal data. All I got was a rough database schema, but with no actual data it was a huge challenge to reconstruct the website. And, because everything was done at the last minute, the original developers couldn't help piece together the puzzle I had inherited either — they had moved on to more interesting work.

There were other challenges as well. It took over six months before the domain registration was finally transferred, and during that time Stay Private had been unavailable. And, more importantly, I needed to find a way to prevent the DMA would block the bot's IP address now that the service was no long run by Consumer Focus. The most feasible solution I could think of was setting up a proper non-profit organisation with sufficient clout to withstand the junk mail lobby. Ideally, such an organisation would involve at least one major consumer champion, such as Citizens Advice or Which. Needless to say, trying to get the non-profit off the ground proved to be an enormous challenge.

For a few years the website showed a holding page, until I eventually had to admit default. I took the website offline in 2017 and let the domain expire.