Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
1–10 of 251 posts
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#2This is the reason I keep "Block third-party cookies and site data" option checked in Chrome.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#3I'm not going to wait for legislation to fix problems I can fix myself. You don't want this to happen? Make sure you have ad-blocking and third party tracker blocking on. I go a step further and use 'Quick JS Switcher' for chrome. By default JS is off and I only turn it on for sites I want. The percentage of sites that I turn it on for is minuscule. I'm seriously starting to question why this isn't the default setup for any freshly downloaded browser.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#4So use an ad blocker. Your profile says you are a "former VP of data @ Kickstarter", I'm sure you know what an ad blocker is, what's your excuse?
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#5I've had several companies ("data partners" they call themselves) approach us to add these scripts to our websites. All of the ones I've seen use MD5(email) for the "anonymous hashing". I mentioned our privacy policy doesn't allow us to give out user emails, and their marketing guys never seem to understand that MD5(email) is basically the same thing. I even made a video example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViCjzJpEaJw that failed to convince them.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#6This is why I own my own domain and have a catch-all email address. When I give a company my email address, I use (companyname)@domain.com.
They all forward to gmail; where it is very easy to filter out (companyname)@domain.com once shenanigans like this happen. It's also easy to track down and shame companies for doing this, too.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#7This is why gmail has a big fat "REPORT SPAM" button. Shenanigans like this are SPAM, and should be reported accordingly.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#8I've had several companies ("data partners" they call themselves) approach us to add these scripts to our websites. All of the ones I've seen use MD5(email) for the "anonymous hashing". I mentioned our privacy policy doesn't allow us to give out user emails, and their marketing guys never seem to understand that MD5(email) is basically the same thing. I even made a video example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ViCjzJ…
Upton Sinclair once said “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#9So use an ad blocker. Your profile says you are a "former VP of data @ Kickstarter", I'm sure you know what an ad blocker is, what's your excuse?
> [...] there may not be much you can do about this besides blocking cookies, ads, and opting out of Criteo’s entire system [...]
He knows, and nobody needs an excuse.
Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
#10This is why gmail has a big fat "REPORT SPAM" button. Shenanigans like this are SPAM, and should be reported accordingly.
The email is just a symptom of the actual problem - tracking. Rather than hit the report spam button, I'd recommend installing a browser add-on that limits tracking.