11–20 of 251 posts
So 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?
Also your comment probably qualifies for flagging since you use personal details to attack someone.
This is why gmail has a big fat "REPORT SPAM" button. Shenanigans like this are SPAM, and should be reported accordingly.
I also tell Twitter that every ad they show me is offensive. Because they are.
This is the reason I keep "Block third-party cookies and site data" option checked in Chrome.
This 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.
No it doesn't. There is no core privacy premise of the internet, and certainly not one that everybody used it signed up for.
I'm not condoning this behavior, but we're in territory that we don't have prior art for. It used to be totally fine for one shopkeeper to mention to another that he saw a customer looking for a particular item. When you do it at scale, the old rules don't apply.
If you think it's spam, hit the spam button in gmail and get rid of it. Use an adblocker. Talk to your congressman about data privacy and sharing laws, because we don't have anything that's effective. Frankly, continue to write Medium posts, because it raises awareness :) But, I disagree with the notion that this is a solved problem with bad actors, because we're in unknown waters.
I'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.”
"Tamarind" == "Throw-Away Mail Alias Randomization Is Not Defeatable"
:)
http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/tamarind/tree/README
I log in with my IMAP4 user name and password, and then get a simple UI with a table of my aliases, and attached memo strings (which can contain URL's that get converted to links). I can edit these, change their order (select multiple, move to top or bottom, etc) create new ones and delete. When I create an alias, it goes "live" instantly, and when I delete one, it goes dead. Dead means that the address is "unroutable" at the SMTP level; it bounces.
I keep a few aliases from Tamarind in my wallet, in case I have to hand out an e-mail address in "3D life" to some untrustworthy outfit to be eligible for some promo or whatever.
I'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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Reporting it as spam impacts their entire operation. Disabling tracking only helps yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Reporting it as spam impacts their entire operation. Disabling tracking only helps yourself.