A friend of mine just recently celebrated her 1st year wedding anniversary. I was casting about for a proper gift on the interweb, as the traditional first year gift is paper, when I found that the PhotoStamps program at stamps.com is back! In case you missed it the first time, this is a program where you can submit pictures to be turned into legal US stamps. The cost is astronomical, in stamp scale that it. A $0.37 stamp will cost you roughly $0.96 after shipping and taxes. But still pretty cheap for a sheet or two of customized stamps, and a great gift it makes. It's even advertised as such. And it makes practical use of my obsessive photography hobby, so that's a bonus right there. Long story short, I order it, it gets shipped, it arrives, and it truncates my gift message. My friend has no idea who it came from. She emails the company asking who sent it, they apparently tell her, and she sends me a nice note of thanks. (Hear that Ani, a Thank You note.) Not three hours later, I get a phone call from stamps.com asking if it is OK to release my personal information to my friend, to let her know that I sent those stamps as a gift. I do like the fact that they called, and I was more then happy to provide permission to release the information. I'm not so happy over the fact that it was released prior to my authorizing it. But got to keep the big picture in focus here. My friend knows I sent her a gift and she likes it, and stamps.com needs to re-audit their privacy policy implementation.