Do you wonder what happens with the information (e-mail address, etc.) that you post to on-line petitions such as Change.org?

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The dot org domain name seems to indicate that this is a non-profit, but don't kid yourself, that is not the case.  If you've ever set up a website and looked into domain names, you will find that there is little, if any, investigation into who you are and why you want a dot org (or any other) designation.
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Meet Change.org, the Google of Modern Politics
By Klint Finley, September 26, 2013

After Trayvon Martin was shot dead inside a Florida gated community and the state declined to press charges against the man who killed him, the boy’s parents took to the web.

In March of last year, they set up an online petition calling for authorities to change their stance. It quickly attracted over 2.2 million virtual signatures, and by the following month, a special prosecutor charged George Zimmerman with murder.

The campaign was a victory not just for the Martin’s family, but for Change.org, the website that hosted the petition. Change.org is a site specifically designed for petitions, providing a way of reaching the public at a speed that was unheard of just a few years ago. A year and half after the Martin shooting, the site is launching more than 25,000 new petitions each month, covering the length and breadth of the world’s causes.

“We have a totally open platform that’s rapidly diversifying,” says CEO and co-founder Ben Rattray. “Some of the petitions are in competition with each other.”

But there’s an extra twist. What many people fail to realize is that Change.org isn’t a non-profit organization.(1) Though anyone can set up a petition for free, the company makes an awful lot of money from all the data it collects about its online petitions and the people who sign them. It’s not just a path to The People. It’s a Google-like Big Data play.

In amassing data from its 45 million users and the 660,000 petitions they’ve created and signed, the company has unprecedented insight into the habits of online activists. If you sign one animal rights petition, the company says, you’re 2.29 times more likely to sign a criminal justice petition. And if you sign a criminal justice petition, you’re 6.3 times more likely to sign an economic justice petition. And 4.4 times more likely to sign an immigrant rights petition. And four times more likely to sign an education petition. And so on.

Change.org uses this data to serve you petitions you’re more likely to be interested in. And, in many cases, it also uses the stuff as a way of pairing you with paying sponsors you’re more likely to give money to.

It’s an intriguing business, and as it turns out, a rather lucrative one. But for some, it also toes an ethical line. “We’ve sort of created an email industrial complex where we’ll do anything to get people’s email address,” says Clay Johnson, a Presidential Innovation Fellow who, in 2004, co-founded Blue State Digital, a for-profit consulting company that helped develop the Obama campaign’s finely targeted fundraising system.


You could even argue that the Change.org recommendation engine is perverting the petition process, creating a Google-like feedback loop that leads us only to where we’ve been before. And when you consider that petitions in places like California can so easily turn into ballot initiatives, this sort of thing looks even more ominous. But that’s the direction politics is headed — towards the Googlization of everything.

[major snippage]

(1) Update 3:30pm EST 09/26/13: This story originally called Change.org a for-profit company, but the company maintains that although it isn’t a non-profit organization, it isn’t a for-profit company. “We are a mission-driven social enterprise, and while we bring in revenue, we reinvest 100% of that revenue back into our mission of empowering ordinary people,” says Hill. “It’s not just that we’re not yet making a profit – it’s that we are decidedly not for-profit.”
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