Websites that may merit a low landing page quality score

At the official adwords blog...

there is mention of data collection sites...

"Data collection sites that offer free gifts, subscription services etc., in order to collect private information"

Are all those sites out there that offer an autoresponder series, or a free white paper in exchange for your email address... are all these sites now automatically deem "low quality"? If so, is this really fair?

Well, first I'd like to know the details... as this is quite a common practice... for website to offer free materials in exchange for your email.

Wouldn't it make more sense to penalize sites that abuse your email, than to penalize everyone? Isn't this akin to throwing the baby out with the bath water?

I just got off a very pleasant chat with adwords chat support, and I was promised a reply on this matter via email, from Kristen.

I'll update this post when I hear from her.

If it is true though... it seems that the only recourse would be to remove email subscriptions from the site, leaving only the RSS feed.

Or... to add a prospect's email address manually, only after they have contacted you privately.

Is it possible that Google has deemed autoresponders all low quality?