On gathering personal data

[flamebyrd]

I've been thinking for a while that I'd like to send birthday cards to people, to give me opportunities to use my nifty paper cutting machine (and associated piles of decorative paper).

So I think I need to make a poll for this, so that people can send me addresses and birthdates. But I'm concerned about using Google Forms for this, for privacy reasons - although to a certain degree I guess we can all assume that Google already has that data. I use Gmail for my email anyway, so again, that data ends up with Google.

Are there any better alternatives? I'd also like to put in a tickybox list of some motif likes/dislikes, so eg. I know who I can send adorable shark cards to without freaking them out.

Comments

[morbane]

This might be a little silly, but what about a screened post here where people give you a codename and a birthdate, and then the post has a link to a form where people can fill out their address according to codename? Would that be a suitable differentiation? Or do you worry about the IP filling out the form linking up to a physical address?

[flamebyrd]

That's not a bad idea! It's hard for me to quantify what I'm worried about, exactly, just that it seems potentially troublesome to be taking information that can be used to locate a person in physical space and keeping it on a server I don't control (eg. that is funded by harvesting personal data for advertisers).

Maybe I should just stick sending mail to people I already know offline. :/