I jealously guard my email address.  The only spam I get on a regular
basis is POPed from a legacy account that will soon be terminated.

I have received Plaxo a notification from a trusted source.  I have
confirmed that the trusted source did indeed send the notification. 
Plaxo's privacy policy says it won't use my data commercially.

   http://www.plaxo.com/support/privacy

My question is:

Is there any rumor or news out there that would suggest otherwise?

Links to such articles or text thereof would constitute a satisfactory
answer, as would a statement saying "I did a reasonable 10min search
but turned up nothing"

Hiya Spurious :)

I did a reasonable 10 minute search in relation to your question above
and while I couldn't find anything that *specifically* raises any
warning bells, I
thought you might be interested in the following:

1. An article (March 2003) by Bill Machrone entitled "The Plaxo Worm 
and the Lovelorn" in which he discusses his own personal experience 
with Plaxo's contact software.  He states (the following quote is an 
excerpt from his article): "I find Plaxo troubling because it sends a
complete copy of your contacts to a third party. Plaxo's privacy 
policy says it won't do anything with those addresses without your 
permission, but if that's the case, why does it want them?"  See the 
full article at:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,905467,00.asp

HOWEVER, see his subsequent update article (March 2003) on Plaxo at:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,949832,00.asp

where he takes a slightly gentler view on the matter.

2. An article (May 2003)in which Plaxo's Vice President of Product 
Development is quoted: "...the company is using technology that offers
the same protections that financial institutions use to keep their 
transactions secure, so that users can assured about the privacy of 
their data.".  See the full article at:

http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/mld/ledgerenquirer/business/technology/5911375.htm

3. Some informal speculation and opinion on Plaxo (November 2002) 
found at:

http://www.smalla.net/infofeed/2002/11/15/speculation_and_opinion_on_plaxo.shtml

In fact, the smalla.net site has various snippets of informal opinion
concerning Plaxo - if you do a search of their archives, you'll find 
the relevant links (see http://www.smalla.net/apps/mt/mt-search.cgi 
for the search results).

Hope the above helps.

Kind regards
jem-ga :)

p.s. of course, the place to go on the web for rumours regarding
companies is
http://www.fuckedcompany.com/.  I did do a search on that site for
Plaxo and a hit came up (see http://tinyurl.com/ivzt) - unfortunately,
it falls under the paid-for (Premium) subscriber content service
($39.99 per month) and I was therefore unable to access it.

Google search strategy:

Keywords: Plaxo, Plaxo concerns

://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Plaxo

://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Plaxo+concerns

Many thanks for a complete and quick response. Tip attached.

Hi Spurious :)

Glad you were pleased with the answer and response time and many
thanks for the tip.

:) jem-ga