You are correct, if the merchants in-house affiliate manager had contacted the affiliates directly then, this would have been fine. You cant start waving a legal stick at relationships that have formed, grown and flourished with affiliates over a number of years and months.

The former aff network may have been the introducers, but it’s the merchant’s in house aff manager that has taken the relationship to a higher level. So I don’t think anyone would have had an issue with this at all, in fact it would have been the way to go.

I can tell you now, as you may already know. The task to migrate affiliates and get them swapping links is a lost cause unless those affiliates were really making substantial sales for them to make the effort. If I look at past events like this, we have seen affiliate sales drop off when links change. We see stats go down for a few months. Its almost like starting from scratch, that whole bedding in period. In time sales will come back from new affiliates that may join the program, which they would have gotten, in this case, had they remained where they were.

This issue is about affiliate data primarily, under no circumstances should a competitor network have had my details unless I was already previously known to them as an affiliate that was generating sales for that merchant. As I said, I have generated next to nothing and I don’t register in any SE’s. They could only have known about me because my data was given to them either on purpose or accidentally.

If this was the US, this would be a lawsuit and of this I am certain.
I could have sued, the former network could have sued.

Another point, this highlights the whole issue about how we handle data, day to day and storage of, whilst this was on such an unprecedented scale of incompetents, at least they can claim it was an accident http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/alice_miles/article2910272.ece

We have to be careful, diligent and I have to ask myself, if the new network has to stoop to using illegal data (regardless of how they obtained it) what message is this sending out to the big brands and small to medium merchants that we are trying to convince about how our industry is cleaning up its act? I hope a lesson has been learnt, I doubt it some how and its just a matter of time before it happens again.

Arrrgg trying to post an HTML link
I Give up