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

My name is fairly popular in my part of the world and everyone who has it uses my email address as a throwaway since they actually authenticate using a phone number. I have matrimonials, visa applications, leave applications, uber accounts, SaaS subscriptions, porn subscriptions, random newsletters and what not. My gmail account is all but unusable now.

I'd love it if the tags were available in SSO as well, as the more stuff that logs in using SSO just reveals the main email. So I definitely got into some sales databases that way for $work email that had a constant flood of cold outreach.

The largest spam problem I have, is the email domain I use is a typo away from another company. So I sometimes get quotes, or emails destined for people at that company that don't hit the spam filters. One time, someone signed up for their online banking under my domain. Recently, I get all the service advisories for someone's Honda car.

However, I feel the need to assert my opinion that librarians are generally pretty fierce defenders of privacy in the specific context of lending/reading history, so your assumption does not ring true at all to me. Libraries/librarians have been consistent defenders of lending history privacy in the face of the Patriot Act[1][2] and I would be shocked to see a pattern of libraries anywhere in the US giving out lending history data in the context of anything but the most direct of legal requirements.

I was employed by a public library once upon a time and received specific training on when to share lending data ("never, and if asked, lock the computer and go get the Director, even if the person asking has a badge").

[1] https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/librarians-speak-out-fir... [2] https://sfpl.org/about-us/confidentiality-and-usa-patriot-ac...