<p>I got a letter from Central Michigan University addressed to “all incoming students and their parents”, that tries to sell a service called Student Backup, supposedly it’s “an affordable file backup/recovery service that provides daily unattended backup of new, existing, and updated files.”</p>
<p>… ***!!!</p>
<p>I never applied to cmich let alone enrolled. Did any other incoming cmu freshman recieve this as well?</p>
<p>no but they make searching for CMU on google an interesting experience</p>
<p>The story here is that Carnegie Mellon is not authorized to use the CMU abbreviation - Central Michigan has exclusive rights to use “CMU”, so you’ll never see “CMU” in official Carnegie Mellon documents. However, Carnegie Mellon of course uses cmu.edu as their web address.</p>
<p>The mail from Central Michigan is rather odd, though. Hopefully you applied to/enrolled at the right CMU :P</p>
<p>LOL I just got that same letter from central michagen that you are talking about. That is just weird</p>
<p>omg i just got the same letter</p>
<p>'K, I guess the consensus is Central Michigan is rather confused. I would just forget about it.</p>
<p>I got the same letter… so strange.</p>
<p>There’s a post from someone on cmu.misc.market (a current student) saying he got the same mailing. His theory is that some company was supposed to send a mailing to Central Mich and bought the addresses of “CMU” students. Whoever they bought the addresses from assumed CMU meant Carnegie Mellon - hence, stupid letters.</p>
<p>how embarrassing… and here I was thinking that I applied to the wrong college</p>
<p>
The larger issue at hand is how a company can rent a mailing list from a college without having any contract with the university - If a contract was involved, I’m sure the marketing company would have realized their mistake. What sort of third parties are involved with the brokering of these mailing lists?</p>
<p>I was scratching my head when that envelope arrived at my house for my brother - He called the company to let them know about the mistake, and the rep on the phone couldn’t really figure out what was going on…</p>
<p>I was the one who posted the info on misc.market. The Information Security Office is looking into it, but here’s my theory. That backup service is owned by the same company that Housing & Dining Services has a contract with to sell bed sheets & stuff to CMU students (I think all freshmen get that mailing). When the company went to send their backup service mailing to Central Michigan, somebody must have selected the database named CMU in their system (it looks like Central Michigan is CMI in their database).</p>
<p>I’ll post again on misc.market if I find out anything more concrete, but it doesn’t seem as if CMU is selling our info or whatnot. Looks like this mistake on the part of that company, which (although a mistake) is probably a violation of their contract with the university - we’ll just have to wait & see what happens.</p>
<p>Matt</p>
<p>i got mine today!</p>