Is UGA Responsible for Students being Hyper-Exposed to Advertisements?


As my senior year at UGA begins, I look back on my time as a freshman in the dorms and think about all of the cool "firsts" that I was able to experience. My first roommate, my first home away from home, and my first mailbox. 

Getting my own mail was something I was oddly excited for. I thought there was something meaningful about receiving stuff exclusively with your name on it. However, after the first week or so I started to realize that most of the content being delivered to our mailboxes were advertisements. Not the kind that has your name on it because you were a frequent customer, but the kind that is mass sent out and placed in everyone’s mailbox. The quantity of advertisements received was so large that if you didn’t clear your mailbox out every other day you would end up with an overflowed mailbox. This was the first occurrence of what I believe to be a problem that is unique to college students.

As freshmen, we had no control over who was able to send us mail. The University did not seem to protect us either. And while an argument can be made for the commonality of junk mail being sent to mailboxes, this problem spilled over into our university emails.


Every week I get an email from Zombie Farms asking for me to come have fun, I have never interacted with this company aside from deleting the excessive emails that they have sent me. I get emails from other random companies that are also directly making offers exclusively for college students including: off-campus housing options, new downtown restaurants, and many others. This influx of what should be filtered as spam is only a problem that occurs on my UGA email address; no other email of mine incurs such a large amount of offers. Other students have mentioned this problem as well. It raises the questions, is UGA profiting off of selling our emails and addresses to companies, or are they just not protecting their students from excessive advertisements? Why are our student emails so readily available for companies to email?

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