Lol oh no I’m petrified.
Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
31–40 of 76 posts
Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
#32An easier way to spin up emails for every account: For some email providers, if you add a "+" modifier to your email address, anything after the + will be ignored and still routed to your main email address. But email systems will still treat them as unique email addresses. (So abc123+Netflix@gmail.com and abc123+nytimes@gmail.com would both be delivered to abc123@gmail.com. This limits their ability to link your acc…
> This limits their ability to link your accounts against each other This sounds extremely naive to me. Why would it limit their ability when this feature of gmail has been publicly known forever? All they need to do is ignore everything after the plus when cross-referencing accounts.
I maintain email systems for a living and it's a completely legitimate hack.
Capital 'S' spammers don't care because they hit wide swaths of email addresses by generating random strings. They don't waste money buying data.
On the other hand, when someone is buying your data from Equifax, there might be some real bright actors out there, but the majority of firms engaging in this kind of behavior are not as technologically robust as you would think. So you will still catch people sharing your email address regularly.
Besides, if you have + modifiers in your email, they don't know what sort of shenanigans you might actually be doing with it. For all they know, it's a DLL with a re-router or it junks all non-modified emails.
Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many legitimate emails have a + in them and don't use such an alias system? I'm sure they exist, but are probably even less frequent than the amount of people using this alias system, thus it's more profitable to strip it out.
What do you mean by "profitable"? If you are just trying to datamine for random email addresses, you can do that with a random string generator. If you want a list of Netflix customers accounts, you probably want the same exact email they signed up with. Besides, you can always make a Gmail rule to junk any emails coming in without a modifier.
Profitable, whether for the company itself or for some oxygen waster to get some metric ("engagement"?) that justifies their salary/promotion.
I'm not saying they will strip out the + from the primary email address used for login/etc - that would be dangerous for many reasons and could deny access to users.
But they are absolutely likely to strip it out for obnoxious behavior which is only valuable at scale and individual failures don't matter - such as ad targeting, email spam, etc. In this case, it doesn't matter if you fail to spam the 0.001% of users with + as part of their actual username if it means you manage to spam the 2% that use + as an alias separator.
Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
#34This is ummm... news?
I thought since the spam floods of the early 2000s everyone knew not to put their real email to get that 5€ off coupon.
Of course tracking is a thing now too. But most people I know, even non techies are aware of that and very reluctant to give any information.
Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
#35> It acts as a digital bread crumb for companies to link your activity across sites and apps to serve you relevant ads.
Isn't this kinda normal now anyway? Like its a fact of life, not much you can do about it, why not hand out your email, its probably out there already anyway.
(OTOH I change my email every 5 years or so)
Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
#36For emails you can register multiple different ones, that's not (easily) possible with phone numbers, and those are what everyone wants now
Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
#37Apple’s “hide my email” feature is nice for this stuff
How do you burn generated emails?
Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
#38Currently I use Fastmail to host my own domain, and then for every new service I save the account in 1Password using service@service.mydomain.com It's a bit extreme, but surprisingly little extra effort. That said, most of the accounts I create are throwaway. For phone numbers I have an old, unused Google voice number I give out. It's a real number, but never checked, except for once every 90? days, to keep it active…
I've been thinking of running a setup like this specifically to rat out who's been selling my e-mail addresses, since the spam would be directed at the service@service.mydomain.com.
Did you find any interesting results from your setup? Some surprising services who sold your address?
Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
#39Currently I use Fastmail to host my own domain, and then for every new service I save the account in 1Password using service@service.mydomain.com It's a bit extreme, but surprisingly little extra effort. That said, most of the accounts I create are throwaway. For phone numbers I have an old, unused Google voice number I give out. It's a real number, but never checked, except for once every 90? days, to keep it active…
Your own domain helps zero to prevent linking your activity across sites. Fastmail masked emails + 1Password helps though.
Of course it does, nobody will take into account the special case of people who use subdomains or even just non-standard email address separators, unless they are a rather determined government agency and then all of a sudden almost no method works anymore for privacy.
I'm pretty sure even Google doesn't care about the dozens of people who use a different email address for different services.
Re: Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It
#40An easier way to spin up emails for every account: For some email providers, if you add a "+" modifier to your email address, anything after the + will be ignored and still routed to your main email address. But email systems will still treat them as unique email addresses. (So abc123+Netflix@gmail.com and abc123+nytimes@gmail.com would both be delivered to abc123@gmail.com. This limits their ability to link your acc…
It seems like some backend code could easily strip the “+” and everything after it before saving an email to a database. Not sure how viable this is but I’ve also never tried it.
I've been using the foo+bar@mydomain trick for over 20 years. I have given this form of email address to well over 1,000 companies and I get exceptionally little spam to foo@mydomain.