REVEALED: How Creepy Marketers Get Your Email Address

We experienced this, again, just this weekend.

Fortunately, as we always make throw away email addresses, we were able to cut them off immediately.

I sure am wondering if we should have marked it as SPAM first as this is unacceptable behavior if I never hit "submit" on their website.

Salutations to all. Last week I got a mail advising me that I had just won an item that I've never bid on. Bid site has "416" on its name. I don't bid anymore there...Regards to all.

CVS is especially abusive. Under the guise of helping you, they send voice mail, email and texts for reminders of Rx's that you have not even filled in months and are expired. They have even filled Rx's where my insurance has "no automatic refills" and where I have had them put in my records manually "do not automatically refill".

Finally, I know how this keeps happening to me. Dastardly tactic for sure. Most importantly, Bob, thanks for showing how to foil this practice.

Then it seems that I did something right when I set up that gmail.com account those many years ago. But I went a step further with the address ... ahgfl001@gmail.com is my trash address. You would have to be a bird breeder to know what those letters and numbers represented. But it has worked for a number of years now. True, it does give a location, but what are the rest of those letters and numbers? It is still working, and when I look at the source of the message I can see where it was sent and then what was done to it to get it to me. A prime example is one that comes from support@edwin.co.in. I didn't have anything to do with India and the company that this supposed person is sending from, I never made any inquirys. Any time I see support@edwin.co.in it gets blocked and immediately goes directly into the Spam folder, but best of all, I'm not downloading any messages onto my system until I have checcked them on my ISP's email server. Call me paranoid but that spam doesn't have a chance of getting onto my computer system until I have checked it on the ISP's server. This way of checking does the trick for me. They get who is sending that spam out not my computer which can't send the blocked senders anywhere but into the system's trash.
The individual's computer doesn't report spam senders to anyone, so they are wasting their time. True it does make a file of spam sent to the person but that won't stop it without being proactive and stopping it on the ISP's server.

This has been happening for a while now. Discovered yesterday that Google tracks lots of stuff on you, including sites visited. Yesterday I turned everything off on my account to see if that helps.

EDITOR'S NOTE: To see if it helps how?

Is there any extensions for the browser that one can install to block this?

According to the U.S. Supreme Court, I have NO expectation of privacy when in public. In fact, if it can be seen from a public place, it is not private. Not your back yard or the interior of your home, unless you take measures to block public view (put up a tall opaque fence around your back yard and/or close your curtains). The sidewalk in front of your home and the street you live on are public places.

The Internet is a public place too, so you should not expect ANY privacy there either. In fact, if anything, the Internet takes being in public to a whole new level. Everywhere you go on the Internet, and all the servers you traverse to get there, have the right to record/track your activity, then use that information anyway they want. This 'tracking' starts with your ISP and any servers they use to provide Internet access to you, then it goes out to any servers you traverse to get to a website (the World Wide Web), and it culminates at the website. ALL of these entities have the right to record your activity on their equipment, then use that information in any way they see fit.

Commercial enterprise has tracked your activity since the first store opened. Sellers do, and always have, kept track of what they sell, and to whom (they keep records). As technology has advanced, so has the ability of sellers to track their customers. As far as I can see, nothing has changed other than the depth and breadth of information sellers can amass.

With the advent of the cell/smart phone, being outside has become as trackable as being on the Internet, and your service provider and any other providers whose networks you travers as you move about in public have the right to record and use your activity in any manner they choose while you use their equipment. So why is anyone surprised about this? The bottom line for me is that you shouldn't do anything on the Internet that you wouldn't do in any other public place, and NEVER EVER expect any measure of privacy when there.

My2Cents,

Ernie

Facebook have always plundered my browser history for targeted ads (i.e. ads they get paid for providing information to the advertiser) so for many years I have used a separate browser just for Facebook. They have recently discovered a way to plunder my un-related browser history so that I get targeted ads from my private, separate browser history - that isn't creepy, that is plain data theft.

Fortunately there is no CVS store where we live but now I know to avoid them...thanx for the info!

Well said Ernie. We should all get our heads around the points Ernie makes.
Chris.

I recently bought an item online from the Asian store first letter: T
Item came fast and I was very pleased with my purchase.
A few days passed and then "BAM" started getting about 1oo emails each day, my spam folder catches all of them, however it really ticks me off!
Of course I never open any of them.

You need to start with Microsoft and Google for sending the largest number of UNSOLICITED emails
especially with sex sites content, etc.

EDITOR'S NOTE: What makes you think Microsoft and Google are sending those messages?

@Ernie/Oldster -- you are really missing the point. Your extreme viewpoint aside (when I'm shopping online I'm not out in public, I'm on a private company website and none of the public can see what I'm doing), why should we accept that our privacy is irrelevant? Why should we accept that companies scrape our data and sell it?

A fantastic book -- The Age of Surveillance Capitalism -- talks about how scraping our data has become the basis of business models for so many enterprises. And it's not just about taking our personal data and selling it to the highest bidder in order to help sell more stuff to us. It's about modifying social and human behavior.

It should give you an icky feeling -- it should be disturbing. And it would be way better if more people resisted the continuing erosion of our privacy.

Stephan,

I was NOT saying that we should be O.K. with the fact that our activity is being recorded. I was simply asking why anyone is surprised by it, and that we should act accordingly. Facts are facts, and everything I said in my previous post was/is true (AFAIK). You are free to agree or disagree, but I stand by what I said.

I didn't say that your connection to some online store and your purchase information was public, but your activity to connect to that store over the Internet was/is. Your ISP (for the most part), the servers over which you connect(ed) to the store, and the store itself all have the right to log (record) whatever travels over their hardware. Additionally, the store has the right to do whatever they want to do with the information they log (record), including selling it in some form, as is true with any hardware over which your connection is routed. The good news is that each packet you send/receive to/from a website will usually traverse a different path across the Internet to get to/from your computer or the website you are connecting with, so what you do on the Internet is less likely to be captured in whole by the servers between your computer and the website you connect to, although it could still be possible, if not virtually improbable.

My2Cents,

Ernie

...and probably you forgot another possible way of leak: if you keep your Google Account logged in, other websites could probably capture your login info. Try to visit Quora and you will see a message saying "Sign in to Quora with Google" and it shows my email and name (and a blue button says "Continue as Leo"). OK, Quora is honest, and they probably won't capture your login, but what if other no honest websites using the same technology and capture that info?. Hopefully there is no way to capture info from an iFrame, but it doesn't make me feel comfortable. I'm an old time reader of your newsletter, you always have very interesting articles (thanks for keeping us informed).

Call me paranoid, but I never use my phone for anything but maps, a flashlight, a camera, a WiFi signal strength meter, etc, and a phone in case my car breaks down and I need to call for help. No email has ever been sent or received on the phone. My grandkids scoff, but that's OK, I sleep well at night.

I have found that shortly after purchasing anything from Amazon, I start receiving unsolicited emails from companies I've never heard of and also text messages with links. So often I tell myself that I won't shop Amazon again, but I do.