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Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

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Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#81

Post by tombrossman »

Karunamon wrote: post #67
actsasbuffoon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California and New Jersey have laws that go above and beyond the protections outlined in CAN-SPAM. I used to work for a company that sent spam (I swear, I didn't know until after I'd already accepted the job), and we avoided sending to those states. If more states would adopt laws like this, we could dramatically curtail spam. As for what constitutes solicitation, I wish it was that simple. In some instances, compani…

the best way to avoid being fingerprinted by advertisers is to block JavaScript by default. Leaving aside the sheer amount of stuff this will break, you're serving to identify yourself in another way, but perhaps not to an advertiser. Given the average website, the number of people using a real web browser (i.e. not bots, curl, wget, etc) who don't run JS is going to be absolutely miniscule. It's kind of like turning…

This topic comes up a lot on HN and my response is always the same. Try NoScript again. Give it a day or two and whitelist the sites you use a lot and trust. You will have a stunningly faster browsing experience and the number of sites that don't work will be surprisingly small.

We have passed a tipping point where all the annoying bullshit that depends on JavaScript to function far outnumbers the random websites that NoScript breaks. LONG time user of it and I just don't have much trouble browsing. It makes the web insanely fast and eliminates most annoyances.

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#82

Post by Nagyman »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #70

I've been getting more spam lately from "legitimate" companies. One of my email addresses leaked from a major open source project I corresponded with. Harvesters found it and now sell it to every small business and entrepreneur marketer you can think of. I get spam from CDNs, off-shoring companies, SEO/SEM, marketing, you name it. Lots of them use sketchy services like reply.io to make it seem like a real person sent…

This has absolutely picked up recently! It doesn't help their brand in my case, as I put them into the "Overly Aggressive Vendor" folder for future reference when I'm actually looking at purchasing services.

Those reply.io emails that look like they're from a real person are a grey area of marketing. I think it's deceptive and places undue social pressure to reply. Sometimes I do reply, but only when I get annoyed. In such cases, I turn the tables and start trying to sell them adventure travel (G Adventures). Sadly, we also use Criteo; thankfully adblockers block Tealium tag manager by default anyway.

When I saw OPs article screenshots, I actually suspected that Criteo had harvested the email address from the Forgot Your Password screen. This isn't uncommon – VE Interactive (I've mentioned them before), reads forms for email address fields and onBlur, they capture it and send marketing emails later. I _think_ this type of behaviour is supposed to be limited to cart abandonment situations, but I'll bet an incorrectly configured tag would target all forms.

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#83

Post by [deleted] »

rootlocus wrote: post #68

I was thinking whether or not sending these emails actually helps companies like Sears by bringing in customers, and whether or not (to an extreme) they might depend on them to survive as a profitable enterprise. What came to me as a revelation is that it's irrelevant. If their income relies on bothering everyone who comes across their website, tricking them into clickbaits or spamming them with (possibly malicious)…

[deleted]

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#84

Post by vxNsr »

chime wrote: post #42

I feel less paranoid now for my browsing process. Almost everything I search is in an incognito window, from shopping and research to programming and how-tos. And when I'm done with looking for a new dog leash or Python module, I close that window. Only things in my main browser are the regular sites I visit and am logged into (email, HN, reddit etc.) I started this after learning about the filter bubble but I've not…

Wouldn't it be easier to just use no script and ublock with whitelisting?

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#85

Post by idlewords »

It's a little rich to write this complaint on Medium, a site that has been uniquely aggressive about tracking its readers' behavior (it has a script that phones home with your position on the page, and its URLs abuse the fragment identifier to track who you got the link from).

If you dislike surveillance capitalism enough to write an essay about it, think about where you're publishing it.

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#86

Post by erlehmann_ »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #47
sp332 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really pushing the boundaries of the CAN-SPAM act. You're not allowed to send unsolicited emails. You shouldn't be allowed to pretend that visiting a site is a solicitation. Edit: I misunderstood the mechanism of collecting the addresses. This isn't skirting "unsolicited mail", but it is circumventing the ban on harvested email addresses.

California and New Jersey have laws that go above and beyond the protections outlined in CAN-SPAM. I used to work for a company that sent spam (I swear, I didn't know until after I'd already accepted the job), and we avoided sending to those states. If more states would adopt laws like this, we could dramatically curtail spam. As for what constitutes solicitation, I wish it was that simple. In some instances, compani…

> I used to work for a company that sent spam (I swear, I didn't know until after I'd already accepted the job)

Did you look for a new job as soon as you knew?

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#87

Post by robin_reala »

sneak wrote: post #52
jdavis703 wrote: post #43

This is why I have the username part of my email address tailored to each site/service I register with. So I have a hackernews@example.org, amazon@example.org, etc. Human beings get my real email though (because it would be weird if I told John Smith to email me at johnsmith@example.org). If people start abusing this (politicians do this a lot), I can just block say timkaine@example.org, and never hear from them or p…

This breaks "i forgot my password" links years later when you forget what tag you used to sign up at some rarely-used service. I stopped doing it.

Luckily your password manager has remembered which email address you used with which domain.

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#89

Post by vxNsr »

chime wrote: post #42

I feel less paranoid now for my browsing process. Almost everything I search is in an incognito window, from shopping and research to programming and how-tos. And when I'm done with looking for a new dog leash or Python module, I close that window. Only things in my main browser are the regular sites I visit and am logged into (email, HN, reddit etc.) I started this after learning about the filter bubble but I've not…

I wonder if there's a way to turn this into an extension, sandbox all browsing into unique sessions until you press a button to pass it to a mixed session, with whitelisting for websites you trust... Wait a sec, wasn't that chrome's initial premise? Sandboxed tabs, what happened to that?

Re: Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

#90

Post by themoonbus »

r721 wrote: post #2

This is the reason I keep "Block third-party cookies and site data" option checked in Chrome.

I used to do that, but it would sometimes break functionality on certain sites, and the whitelist is a bit of a pain to manage. I've had good success with http://disconnect.me
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