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BAIT &
SWITCH ! - How to beat sites that sell or inadvertently disclose your email...
 ABOUT
SITES THAT SHARE
(the Worst Offender revealed!) E-mail addresses Obviously these are required to set up accounts for shopping or online services. Unfortunately, some businesses may share your address. It is hard to tell in advance which ones are going to do this. Sometimes you see a little box at the bottom of the page in the signup process that says something like:And often, the box is pre-checked! Always scroll to be bottom of every page to catch these. Sites that collect your email address "usually" do not intend for the result to be that your address gets added to an uncontrolled spam list, but if they share your address with several affiliates, and these in turn share, it may reach a point where your address is in the hands of someone who has no relationship with you. Credit cards too! Beware if you are asked to pay only for something like age verification. Not only will the site you wanted turn out to be broken or non-existent beyond the come-on pages, your credit card number may have been stolen! Many victims are embarrassed to report the theft when charges first come in, because they don't want to admit where they were browsing. Big & small... You cannot be sure about anybody, until you have done business with them for years and gotton no spam. I strongly suspect some major companies of selling your email address. I cannot prove it, so I won't say which ones, but they provide free web services that nearly everybody in the world is signed up for. Shopping site, web hosting providers... Just about any kind of site is liable to do this. Privacy policies are so long most people do not read them. And if you do, so what? It just says that if you want our service, you have to tolerate whatever we do with your personal information! The single worst offender... ... is probably these "submit your site to 1500 search engines for free" offers. Most search engine submissions require your email address, so you just submitted your address to 1500 search engines. Check the details and you'll find that 1400 of these are pornography search engines. 1000 are overseas, many in high risk former Soviet bloc countries where hacking is a high art form. Even if the "free submit" site has a rigorous privacy policy, you just asked them to spread your address all over the net! Where is the leak? It is hard to tell where
you address leaked out, because when you sign up for something like a free
mail account, you may pick a name that someone else abandoned last year
because they inadvertently got on too many spam lists. Or a hacker
may have broken in and stolen the addresses. Or the web site operators
may have just sold your address.
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BAIT
& SWITCH
What to do? You could just not avail yourself of the convenience of web shopping and avoid all web services, free or otherwise. In other words, give up your net-citizenship! Or, you could use the simple trick I am about to show you! Get a Free Email Account... Free services can be risky - sources of spam themselves. But think of this as fighting fire with fire! Some of the free email services actually have the best tools for fighting spam. But the main reason to get a free email account is to have a "disposable" email address to use on high risk sites. In this way, most of the spam you collect will come to this free account, which you can browse once a week at your leisure, because it is not mixed up with your serious email! Advantages of Web Email The free email accounts at places like hotmail.com and yahoo.com (there are many others), are web based. And most of them have spam filters (which you can configure) and bulk mail folders. That means . . .
Yahoo has a nice configurable news service, calendar, etc. in addition to mail, and I've never had a spam problem there. What do I mean by bait & switch? When opening a web account, use your free email address (the bait). Later you can change it to your regular address if this is not convenient (the switch). Even if the signup address was spammed, the address change is less likely to be sold or shared. It is the new account signup (usually) that triggers the spammers to acquire and abuse your address. For years I've used both Hotmail & Yahoo this way. Addresses that had to be public, like in the domain records, were vectored to one of these accounts. You can also, of course, set up multiple mailboxes on your web site and use them the same way. But then the spam eats up some of your storage and bandwidth. For more information on protecting your electronic privacy, see the Electronic Privacy Information Center |
