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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

#191

Post by kristianc »

zer0gravity wrote: post #175
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…

> There is no core privacy premise of the internet, and certainly not one that everybody used it signed up for. Sure there isn't. The internet is just a jungle where predatory animals can hunt you down if you go in their teritory. They say we've exited from the jungle once, but apparently the jungle is still in us. Besides ad blockers, we need more plugins to help us mark these animals and keep us away from them. A n…

This works really well for me, and avoids the overhead of using a browser plugin: https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts

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

#192

Post by majewsky »

jameshart wrote: post #49
derefr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> CAN-SPAM only applies to senders in the U.S. Given that SMTP is a relay system, would the first US-soil SMTP gateway machine a message travels through be its legal "sender" (in the way that e.g. the importer of a foreign medical device is liable if it's not FDA-approved)? One would think this would legally force those gateways, when handling foreign-originated spam, to slap their own address on them with their own…

Mail is not actually sent over a series of SMTP relays, though. It's basically routed directly to the MX SMTP server for the domain.

Except in some corporate intranet setups, but that's not really relevant for this discussion.

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

#193

Post by majewsky »

downandout wrote: post #99
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.

First, CAN-SPAM doesn't outlaw the sending of unsolicited commercial messages - on the contrary, it lays out rules for sending them. Second, in this case, at some point this guy agreed to receive emails from Criteo when entering his email address somewhere. The fact that people don't read TOS before they agree to them does not invalidate them.

The question is not a legal one, but a moral one. Of course the TOS are agreed on by the user, but it's still not what they want, so I still consider it unsolicited from a moral POV.

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

#194

Post by dingaling »

codedokode wrote: post #143
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…

As a side effect disabling javascript also makes pages load faster, makes browser use less memory, hides advertisements and protects you from popups.

> As a side effect disabling javascript also makes pages load faster

Ironically on our rather elderly laptops NoScript actually increases page loading times by a factor of two and that's with the out-of-the-box configuration. I haven't looked to see what pattern-matching algorithms it uses but they're very slow.

Core2 Duo Dell Latitudes.

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

#195

Post by majewsky »

toomanybeersies wrote: post #159
Houshalter wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It used to be totally fine for one shopkeeper to mention to another that he saw a customer looking for a particular item. I dunno. If a shopkeeper kept detailed records of everything you've ever bought or looked at, and gave that info away, it would be pretty creepy.

Supermarkets do that. It's actually scary how much data they collect and what they can do with it. Target managed to figure out when people were pregnant: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targe...

And yet people laugh at me when I tell them how I buy as much as possible with cash.

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

#196

Post by timlyo »

amelius wrote: post #189
yeknap wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point a plugin probably isn't enough. We need a better browser that gets back to the document viewing roots. Something better than NoScript that has a rough idea of the types of transforms a domain's JS performs so that it can serve me the "page" w/out running suspicious code. Although I suspect this would just start a new style arms race of obfuscation similar to adblock, etc.

> Although I suspect this would just start a new style arms race of obfuscation similar to adblock, etc. We could use AI to detect and remove ads, perhaps combined with collaborative filtering.

And what would the advertisers do next?

That would just further the arms race.

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

#197

Post by majewsky »

cyberferret wrote: post #127

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. MO…

And you don't use an adblocker yet?

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

#198

Post by Jaruzel »

kaila wrote: post #166
cyberferret wrote: post #127

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. MO…

I assumed poop up was intentional and thought it was pretty clever. Glad you left it as-is!

Ditto!

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

#199

Post by Jaruzel »

From the Article:

  I am signed up to some platform which is a Criteo partner. It’s entirely unclear
  who this partner is. While Criteo boasts a “close partnership” with Facebook,
  Facebook claims that they do not share personally identifying information such as
  your email address with ad partners. Regardless, a platform with my email address
  gave it to Criteo.
This issue is exactly why I use specific email addresses for each website. I tend to follow the pattern @mydomain.com. That way if a site leaks my email address to spammers (either intentionally or accidently) I know which site it was, and immediately boycott them in future and move that email address into a blacklist.

For big sites I cannot boycott, I simply register a new email address with them (i.e. @mydomain.com), and move the original into the blacklist.

As I run my own on-premises email system, I can't benefit from crowd-managed spam systems, so keeping a lid on the incoming spam is very much a pro-active action for me.

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

#200

Post by jrockway »

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.

I don't think you even need to bother with this. Do you use categories? I do, and stuff like this always ends up in the "Promotions" folder, which I look at approximately never because it's all spam.
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