Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 251 posts

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

#121

Post by hudell »

LoSboccacc wrote: post #116

here's another special snowflake that does the internet equivalent of 'I want to talk to the manager' it is their website, so if you don't like their terms, leave. I do run adblocks etc to avoid drive bys, but if a website relies on delivering me spam&malware I just avoid it Also why is this guy so upset about retargeting now? it has been a thing for more than a decade, and without it one would just see some generic…

1) There's no way to know the site's terms when you're coming to it for the first time from google. 2) He isn't complaining about retargeting, he's complaining that his email address was shared through it.

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

#122

Post by robryan »

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)…

There would definitely be some level of revenue being driven off these. It is an interesting case where apart from the software it didn't cost them anything to get the email address, so getting a higher unsubscribe rate doesn't seem so bad. (As opposed to discounts/ deals/ competitions) you might normally run to get someone onto a mailing list.

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

#123

Post by mSparks »

arnaudlaudwein wrote: post #73

This is legal[1] in Europe if you consented to receive marketing emails from "partners" of a website you subscribed to (through an opt-in, not an opt-out checkbox). You subscribe to website X, you opt-in to offers from third-parties, and this allows X to share your e-mail address with Criteo. Then Criteo sends you marketing e-mails for the account of Sears ( but they surely don't share any PII with Sears - the e-mail…

Quick vent.

I'd much rather lawyers just kept of the internet entirely.

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

#124

Post by nashashmi »

Bartweiss wrote: post #26
gwbas1c wrote: post #6

This 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.

Even for Gmail users, the + notation will handle this well. foobar@gmail.com and foobar+SearsSoldMyEmail@gmail.com will both direct to the same location, and relatively few resellers have the sense to strip the extra data.

That does not work because anybody who has your email address knows to remove anything after '+'. The only case it can work is if you were to only use addresses where there was a + sign, and throw all other emails to the trash.

I have thought of a similar technique but this time using a period that would float between all the letters I have in my username. Any emails sent to an address without the period gets autodeleted.

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

#125

Post by nashashmi »

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…

The big problem is when you give out your email address to a human who stores it in his contacts, and some malware app gets a hold of his contacts and sells/distributes it.

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

#126

Post by nashashmi »

I don't understand why everybody does not block third-party cookies by default. I took a stab at my cookie list and found 300 cookies from advertisers and intel gatherers. I deleted them selectively, but I did not want go through that again, so I blocked the third-party ones.

Some have been explicitly aloud because I trust them, like google analytics. But other google cookies are prohibited, like plus.google.com. Facebook is explicitly blocked. Doubleclick is blocked. some websites will not work if certain third parties are blocked, so i have to explicitly allow them once i realize the problem.

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

#127

Post by cyberferret »

I am really beginning to hate browsing the web these days... Especially poop up dialogs asking for my email as soon as the mouse cursor leaves the active browser screen. With an average of 20 browser tabs open, while one is loading I often go to click on another to check on something, and this instantly triggers a flurry of popups begging me to stay/subscribe.

Also the retargeted ads that follow me everywhere now. MOST of them are for companies where I have ALREADY bought something, so they are wasting their ad spend on chasing an existing customer, not a likely prospect.

This has made me resolve to try and make the web a less shitty place, one web site at a time - and I have ensured that my web projects absolutely DO NOT have any popups or cross site tracking in there (aside from normal analytics that is only used in house).

[I accidentally mis-typed 'pop up' above but LOVE the Freudian slip so will leave it as-is].

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

#128

Post by chadgeidel »

Am I paranoid in assuming their "opt out" system is basically probably an "opt in"?

Related: I know that it's possible to "opt out" via the Direct Marketing Association communications (https://dmachoice.thedma.org/), but have thus far not done this as I assume I'll just get more junk mail.

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

#129

Post by xg15 »

trjordan wrote: post #15

> This transaction breaks a core promise using the internet: just because I visit a website doesn’t mean I consent to getting spam from it. 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 anoth…

The web exists for 20+ years now. How exactly is visiting a website unknown waters?

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

#130

Post by davidgerard »

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…

>Be sure to mark every email like this you receive as spam so you don't get any more and so their reputation decreases enough to route all of this spam to everyone's spam folders.

This really works, too.

Post reply on HN