Ask HN: People who use different emails everywhere, who sold you to spammers?

> I do check once a week during my weekly digital chores.

OT, but I’m going to start using “digital chores”. When my partner asks what I’m doing and I answer “paperwork” it doesn’t sound quite right.

Same situation. I've been enrolled in a Canadian girls hockey team, received a recommendation letter for Dayton university, and various tickets for events in Australia. Glad I'm not alone.

I figured that our phones would have had better security principles to prevent this from happening now but I guess I was mistaken.

Political spam is incredibly shady in the US, but I don't get the volume you're describing. Maybe at one point I did, though, maybe 10 years back. I do get a good amount from both major parties.

It beggars belief, but sometimes one party will be sending mails carefully tailored to make you think they are from the other party - stealing not just the overall design and color schemes, but even trying to use turns of phrases common to the other party. The mails will link back to a similarly carefully crafted website which never says which party the candidate is from. If you sniff around, you can find their other site which is designed to appeal to their usual voters, which clearly identifies which party they are from. I've seen a half dozen state level politicians pull this in the last 15 years or so. Crazy stuff.

Additionally, I get political spam (and a few other politics adjacent topics) meant for my father (addressed to him by name). This is because AOL sells subscriber lists to spammers, and I still have an AOL address from my teenage years and I'm a techno-packrat who never willingly throws anything away. How do I know they sold their subscriber lists? Because my father had the master account, and my siblings and I all had sub-accounts from the main one. Obviously, in the AOL records which got sold his name was on all the email addresses as the account owner. But of course, AOL has been a shady company for decades so this is no surprise.

I get a lot of spam from various meetup groups too. One which I can't shake, which I find very amusing, is "Women in Tech" meetups. My IRL name is male, but not that common anymore, and people are tempted to read it as feminine. Try as I might, I cannot convince them that I should not be showing up to "Women in Tech" meetups and unsubscribing doesn't seem to do anything. I have taken to just forwarding those emails to my wife, who actually is a woman in tech, but strangely doesn't get these emails.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I think this is a two-party problem? Due to the polarity, people (as a mob) are 'forced' to back their party regardless of how scummy the affiliated actors act. Your regret means nothing because you probably still won't vote for another party and they already have as much of your money as you are willing to give. They can continue to harvest funds with these dark patterns with no cost - and they will find some whales who strongly respond to the marketing no matter the spam.

The Trump campaign has had some remarkable temerity in this field:

>GROSS: So let me stop you. So in order to not make monthly donations, you had to notice that there was a pre-checked box saying you were making monthly donations. And you had to uncheck that box. You had to take action (laughter) if you didn't want to make monthly donations?

>GOLDMACHER: Exactly. That's what they did earlier in the campaign. And then they made the box more complicated. They added a second box to take out a bonus donation a few days later. And they added all kinds of extraneous text in each of these boxes. And so by the end of the race, the disclosure that this box that was pre-checked would withdraw a monthly donation was buried beneath seven lines of other text that had nothing to do with the fact that it was going to take this money out every month, and seven lines of text saying there's going to be a second donation. So if you sign up to give $25, you gave that day, they took out another $25 a few days later. And then it took out $25 every month. And then this is what they did at the end of the race which caused such a spike in refund requests. They didn't take the money out every month, they started taking it out every week. And so while somebody might miss that their donation happened a second time the next month or they take a couple of months on their credit card to miss, you don't usually miss that suddenly, your credit card has four contributions in a single month when you intended to only make one. And so what happened in the reporting that I did was that there was a huge surge of complaints to credit card companies of fraud, saying, this is wrong. I didn't sign up for these kinds of donations.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1092816157