AAS Aware of Meeting Attendee List Sales Offers

The AAS has found out that third parties are sending emails to our members and others in the astronomy community offering to sell them contact lists of our conference attendees. We are investigating the entities and individuals involved and hope to be able to stop them.

The AAS does not sell or make available our meeting attendees' personal information to any organizations or individuals for any purpose. Further, we protect the meeting registrant list from data harvesting to ensure the privacy of our conference attendees. We do, however, make attendees' names and affiliations (but not contact information) available to authenticated registrants so that they can identify friends and colleagues who will also be attending the meeting.

We will investigate and attempt to stop any and all inappropriate use of our conference attendee lists and apologize to those members of the astronomy community who have been approached by unscrupulous organizations. Thank you to everyone who notified us of their approaches.