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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

#101

Post by TeMPOraL »

tombrossman wrote: post #81
Karunamon wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

Hear, hear.

I've been using uMatrix for some time (I'm a control freak, I guess) and I support this - you end up whitelisting a few sites here and there (or even just some aspects of those sites, in case of uMatrix), and the Internet becomes overall a much better (and faster) place. The amount of useless JS bloat on-line is staggering, and it hurts me that developers are actually defending this practice. Engineers should know better.

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

#102

Post by cptskippy »

I've been using a catch-all email domain for years where anytime I give out an email address, the local part is a description of the party receiving the address (e.g. bestbuy.com@mydomain.com).

If I receive spam at a particular address, it's easily blocked and I know who leaked it.

An interesting side effect of receiving email from so many different addresses to the same inbox is that I often receive the same spam to multiple addresses simultaneously. This is easily caught by spam filters and so I never have Spam in my inbox. It also makes identifying false positives in my Spam box easy because they usually stand out against the repeated subject lines so it's a simple game of which one of these is not like the others.

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

#104

Post by TeMPOraL »

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…

> 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.

The on-line equivalent of that would be e-commerce sites sharing their detailed analytics data with each other. What was described in the article is more alike to a shopkeeper saying to another, "Did you see that woman in red scarf? Her name is Jane Doe, she lives in the house over that hill. She seems to be interested in this particular item, so your best bet is to upsell her something similar."

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

#105

Post by TeMPOraL »

ryandrake wrote: post #20
hueving wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reporting it as spam impacts their entire operation. Disabling tracking only helps yourself.

But does it? No matter how many times I click "Report Spam" Google is not going to wholesale block LinkedIn's E-mail operation. At least those E-mails will start showing up in my own spam folder, but that's hardly affecting "their entire operation".

LinkedIn may be a special case, and then Google may be a special case too. But it will definitely help for all the other countless sites that are not LinkedIn.

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

#106

Post by vxNsr »

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.

Yahoo offers a similar service and is the only reason I use them still (though of course all yahoo emails then get forwarded to gmail).

Yahoo's implementation gives you a secondary email address of the form [fakeemail]-*@yahoo.com where you get to add in anything after the dash and only email addresses you create are valid and will be sent to you. You can also delete these email addresses at any time. Also you're able to respond to emails from using these temp accounts so you don't have to worry about revealing yourself.

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

#107

Post by TeMPOraL »

not_a_codfish wrote: post #98

Just because you write a blog post doesn't mean I have to do it. Spam is acceptable content, you've no right to tell anybody what they can or cannot create. If you don't like it, then don't look at it. If they shove it in your face, it's YOUR job to ignore it, not their job to somehow pre-determine who wants to see it and who doesn't. As a content creator, I'm not obligated to do a background check on each user and t…

You're joking, right?

> If they shove it in your face, it's YOUR job to ignore it, not their job to somehow pre-determine who wants to see it and who doesn't.

No, it's exactly their job. It's the difference between pushing and pulling. If you want to show your content to people, start a webpage and put it there. No one gets the right to be offended by the content of a website they're browsing voluntarily. But conversely, no one gives you the right to shove the content in my face.

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

#108

Post by spacehunt »

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…

> It used to be totally fine for one shopkeeper to mention to another that he saw a customer looking for a particular item.

No it wasn't fine at all. I certainly do not expect them to share my contact details without my consent, offline or not.

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

#109

Post by bcoates »

vxNsr wrote: post #89
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?

Blanket blocking of third party cookies and frames isn't necessarily a complete solution, but it breaks most of these and very little of value.

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

#110

Post by r721 »

themoonbus wrote: post #90
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

Yeah, there are some problems, but nothing too critical for me. Examples:

1) Disqus-like commenting systems (I don't use them)

2) Diigo bookmarklet (whitelisted)

3) Youtube liking/favoriting at the time when they tried to marry it with Google+ (fixed now)

And I think that's it, can't recall anything else.

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