Browsing your website does not mean I want your spam
medium.com
medium.com
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 another that he saw a customer looking for a particular item. When you do it at scale, the old rules don't apply.
If you think it's spam, hit the spam button in gmail and get rid of it. Use an adblocker. Talk to your congressman about data privacy and sharing laws, because we don't have anything that's effective. Frankly, continue to write Medium posts, because it raises awareness :) But, I disagree with the notion that this is a solved problem with bad actors, because we're in unknown waters.
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.
Actually, you ARE allowed to send unsolicited email, even commercial (UCE). It has to be clearly labeled, contain the postal address of the sender, and contain unsubscribe links. Also, CAN-SPAM only applies to senders in the U.S. (unfortunately).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Applicabi...
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 unsubscribe link, that would—if clicked—then block those messages from coming through that gateway.
> Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list.
To me it seems more of an honor-based system rather than one there's any enforcement for. Much like the Do Not Call list.
I don't care if a spam email has an unsubscribe link or the sender is clearly labelled. Once it's received and seen, the damage is done.
We could always send gunboats to reduce cities whose citizens send unsolicited emails to the U.S. … /s
More seriously, this does seem like the sort of thing which could be addressed through bilateral or multilateral negotiations, including between the private firms who own the international Internet connexions.
Sorry, this is completely false information that is easily verifiable by looking at the wikipedia page for the can spam act: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Sending_b...
>But when sending unsolicited commercial emails, it must be stated that the email is an advertisement or a marketing solicitation.
For example, Canada’s Bill C-28¹ explicitly prohibits it.
――――――
¹ — http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/canada-s-new-anti-spam-law-ap...
> This is really pushing the boundaries of the CAN-SPAM act. You're not allowed to send unsolicited emails.
The USA is not the only country in the world, but the CAN-SPAM act totally permits unsolicited emails, which is the context of this thread.
The US is the only country with a CAN-SPAM Act. Unless Canada has one of those too?
As for what constitutes solicitation, I wish it was that simple. In some instances, companies will buy your email address from another company, and they believe that constitutes consent. In other words, you did business with Company Foo, and I did business with Company Foo, so you consented to do business with me. It's insane.
Having been inside one of these businesses, I have three pieces of advice.
First: Mark spam emails as spam when you see them. You only have to get a few of your messages marked as spam to get your IP address blacklisted. You have far more power over spammers than you think. Not only that, but spammers fear this so much that they keep databases of complainers, and they'll leave you alone in the future. Sometimes they'll even share lists of complainers with other companies so they won't risk your wrath.
Spam companies love non-complainers. Even if you don't open the spam, not complaining helps their numbers with the email provider. By not complaining, you're sending a signal to your email provider that this is a good email, and other users would like to receive it. Not only that, they'll remember you as a person who can be relied upon to not complain, so you'll get more spam than other people.
Second: Read EULAs. We did business with some super-shady companies who sold us tons of really invasive user info. One company even sold us the contents of people's email. Not just meta data, we could actually read the content. They don't mention any of this on their site, but it's subtly stated in the EULA. Read them and check for references to sharing your data with business partners.
I've steered clear of some browsers and email clients as a result of vague EULAs that leave the potential for harvesting my data and selling it.
Third: This one is going to be unpopular on Hackernews, but the best way to avoid being fingerprinted by advertisers is to block JavaScript by default. There are bajillions of ways to uniquely identify your computer, right down to having your browser report which fonts you have installed. Almost every single technique relies on Flash, Java, or JavaScript. Ad-blockers help, but they don't catch everything.
I use NoScript to turn off JavaScript by default, and I only enable a site if it seems legitimate and the site is broken without it.
Here's a terrifying list of the things advertisers can do to uniquely identify you without consent and without a cookie. As the article says, disabling JavaScript by default is by far the most effective method for protecting yourself from fingerprinting: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fingerprinting
It's a little inconvenient, but good security always is. The locks on your front door are inconvenient (what if you lose your key?), but hopefully they're even more inconvenient for would-be intruders.
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 on Do Not Track - most people have it off, so you're highlighting yourself by turning it on.
We have passed a tipping point where all the annoying bullshit that depends on JavaScript to function far outnumbers the random websites that NoScript breaks. LONG time user of it and I just don't have much trouble browsing. It makes the web insanely fast and eliminates most annoyances.
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.
It can make the web more usable than globally disabling javascript.
If you turn it off, they can put you into the "disabled javascript" pool of users. So what?
But if you keep it on, they can query half a dozen APIs and get a much more detailed configuration of your browser. Which lets them put you into a much smaller pool and identify you more confidently.
I've been surfing forever with noscript, only white listing those domains I need.
Exploding cookies (the add on, not the terrorist device), and an ad blocker, and the internet is quite usable.
Did you look for a new job as soon as you knew?
The overhead in getting another job is high modulo personal circumstance.
Why not use the helpful comment and try to be non-judgemental?
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.
> § 17529.2. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, a person or entity may not do any of the following:
> (a) Initiate or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement from California or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement sent from California.
> (b) Initiate or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement to a California electronic mail address, or advertise in an unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisement sent to a California electronic mail address.
> (c) The provisions of this section are severable. If any provision of this section or its application is held invalid, that invalidity shall not affect any other provision or application that can be given effect without the invalid provision or application.
tl;dr You may not send unsolicited commercial email to California residents. You are also barred from sending unsolicited commercial email from within the state of California, but this is independent of the first part.
There is in Europe, in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (basically the EU's Bill of Rights).
Huh? Outside of some tiny village the shopkeeper would not know the name and address of customers that are just browsing. If a shopkeeper hired private investigators to stalk those customers, following them around everywhere gathering as much personal information as possible, it would probably run afoul of some law.
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."
Disgusting, but captures the information age in a nutshell..
No it wasn't fine at all. I certainly do not expect them to share my contact details without my consent, offline or not.
That's close to what happened.
OP got email from Sears, after browsing their site. But OP had never given an email address to Sears. OP had an account with (say) Home Depot. And then Criteo got OP's email address from Home Depot, and provided it to Sears.
The details of what actually happens when you visit a website are known to a tiny number of highly technical people (a few tens of millions globally). Most people have no idea what sort of data can be gathered and used to track you across the internet. People don't understand that Amazon, Facebook, Apple, etc all use the same third parties to share information and build immense profiles about every aspect of who they are and what they do, nor do they understand the way statistical analyse can be used to glean even more insight from that information.
Nothing like the internet has really existed before. Although browsers have existed for 25 years most people didn't use one before about 15 years ago, and most people weren't tracked in the way they are now until 10 years ago. This is new ground. We can't expect non-technical people to grok this stuff quickly.
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.
The self-checkout machines only ask for the phone number, with no id challenge. I get the discounts + no tracking, my friend gets more gas points, and the store is left wondering why he buys so much toilet paper.
I wonder how long it will be before they start cracking down on this somehow, and how far they'll take it.
Right, because: 1) You're talking about a town so small that everybody knows everybody else's business anyway and fully expects this; 2) (yet paradoxically) I doubt the conversation would include much in the way of detailed personal info (unless it was gossip); 3) Regardless, in those days you probably saw both shopkeepers in church the following Sunday and could get any grievances resolved very quickly, and the shopkeeper is eager to resolve it rather than risk a bad reputation in a small tight-knit community.
I agree that it doesn't break a core promise of the internet. It does, however, potentially break the law. To be clear, it doesn't necessarily break it. But if the author actually has never given his email address to anyone who explicitly stated that it could be resold or transferred to a partner, then this violates CAN-SPAM.
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 nice plugin would be to just remove from your searches all the links to domains known to be involved in spam.
Then so be it. Apparently life is an arms race..
We could use AI to detect and remove ads, perhaps combined with collaborative filtering.
That would just further the arms race.
AI will perhaps push ads into the subconscious space. But an arms race will make ads more and more subconscious, until they basically disappear.
("But Thog, bigger sharp stick will just mean angrier dangercat. Is club race. Why ever do?")
I was researching some network equipment, looking at lots of websites and comparing products.
Then my desk phone rings. A call being passed from the switchboard - someone asking for the person responsible for IT purchasing.
It was a sales rep from a network equipment distributor, saying they noticed I was browsing their website and wanted to help me through the purchasing process.
I had never used their website in the past. No-one from my company had. I never signed up. I didn't login. I was bewildered.
I asked how they got my details. The rep said they pay a third party remarketing agency for contact details of people who visit their website.
We were a really small company, with no DNS PTR on our main (NAT'd) public IP. We did have an A-record for our mail domain pointing to this IP.
As the sales rep didn't know my name, all I can assume is that their remarketing agency was looking up our public IP addresses in some IP-to-business database, populated by email headers or sign ups at other user sites.
In any case, I wasn't pleased and was pretty surprised at the rather aggressive sales technique.
A few times, we decided to hold 'lunch-and-learn' type in-person events in a region based on the regional concentration of IP addresses from prospect companies and search queries from those regions to tailor our presentations.
I view it as providing high level of customer service, before and after sales, in B2B space. It is no different than Amazon displaying related products that you might be interested in or Netflix showing you a queue based on your past viewings, in consumer space.
For example, if a visitor's company produces widgets and as a vendor we have previously helped other producers of same widget. It is in both our and visitors interest to share such and related information. Similarly, a visitor from an existing customer might be searching for a solution to her problem with the vendor's product and doesn't believe the problem is big enough to warrant a support/service call or it is a user and not administrator/manager of the product. A proactive engagement by vendor support group goes a long way in understanding the potential user issues with product, a valuable insight for future product enhancements.
In B2B settings, sales cycles are long and require lot of information exchange between various stakeholders within the potential customer. Both vendor and potential user of the product inside the company (who might become internal champion of solution) benefit by build the relationship early, quickly and efficiently.
IMO, this is the main reason for DropBox failure in penetrating the enterprise despite its high usage by individual users within enterprise. Delays in engaging enterprise users allowed Box to get in to enterprise accounts by targeting decision makers and overriding individual users' preference.
Browsing a website for the first time should never result in a phone call. I agree with the parent -- this behavior will result in a lifetime net of $0 from me to you.
It's not like your web site is hiding the phone number or lacking in other ways for me to contact you. If I look at your website and don't use them, I have decided not to talk to you. It's essentially disrespectful for you to say "Oh, you poor fool, you don't know what you're doing. Clicking once is too hard for you. I'd better call you right away."
And then once the phone rings, we're off to the races with a host of manipulative sales tactics. Whee! Just how I wanted to spend my afternoon.
You try to wrap this manipulation up in the language of helping. But when you sing the praises of "build[ing] the relationship early, quickly and efficiently", you ignore that only one relationship is going to get built; the rest is just a giant waste of time, the very opposite of efficiency. And your last paragraph really gives away the lie. The point of the techniques isn't to help the customer. It's to allow the vendor to dominate a market without respect to actual product quality.
In a way, I feel bad for akg_67 and people like him. Our morals too easily conform to our jobs. As Upton Sinclair says, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." I was lucky enough to see the problem young, and lucky again that I could afford to make my living some other way. But there are a lot of people stuck in these ethical traps. I wish there were more ways out for them.
What time period?
Sales is a very telling counterpoint to economic "free market" theory.
I look at sales and advertising as an arms race. If nobody did it, we would be fine, especially now when publishing is free and search is incredibly good. But if anybody does it, all their competitors are obliged to keep up.
The free-market equilibrium is obviously wasteful. I'm sure we could save a half-trillion dollars a year if we eliminated this sort of arms race. I'd expect free market advocates to be excited about this because it would also remove a great deal of market distortion, allowing market mechanisms to work better. Their lack of interest I take as a tell: what really motivates them is not free markets.
I'm doing some research on Edward Bernays again. Absolutely fascinating and revolting creature.
If you've not seen Adam Curtis's The Century of the Self, do.
I also think that Free Markets are a smokescreen, though I'm not sure all those using as such realise it. I'm fairly convinced the main propaganda ministers -- the Mont Pelerin Society, Atlas Network, Cato, etc., do. Johan Norberg is their currently annointed Prince of Darkness.
Is is very different imho. Looking up contact details of site's visitors by IP is much like following a person back home and try to sell him something just because he stopped by your shop's window briefly. That's just creepy, I would never deal with a company that does that.
I suppose this speaks more to my competency level than to theirs, whoops!
A second unsolicited sales call would result in permanent blacklisting.
Our IVR system warned callers that unsolicited sales calls would result in this action.
In the IT department alone 90% of incoming calls were sales calls. After this rule was brought in the volume was much reduced.
Also, we learned a lot of new swear words from angry salespeople.
Lots of them use sketchy services like reply.io to make it seem like a real person sent the email. And then another that looks like a reply to the first when you don't respond. And then another and another. Like Katie Malone at HawkSEM.com who 'personally' spammed me another 'reply' today. Essentially, folks like reply.io and similar automate the process of repeat spamming. Even their tag line is "Send Cold Emails That Feel Warm".
Here's a reality check for you: sending "cold emails" to a list of email addresses you bought makes you a spammer. Even if you try to make them appear personal. The giveaway is the tracking image (usually hidden or 1px by 1px white of course) and tracking links in every email so they can track whether you opened it and whether you clicked anything along with the unsubscribe link at the bottom. Except they don't label it as unsubscribe. It says "If you don't want to get any more emails from me, just let me know." with 'just let me know' as a link.
Be sure to mark every email like this you receive as spam so you don't get any more and so their reputation decreases enough to route all of this spam to everyone's spam folders.
Those reply.io emails that look like they're from a real person are a grey area of marketing. I think it's deceptive and places undue social pressure to reply. Sometimes I do reply, but only when I get annoyed. In such cases, I turn the tables and start trying to sell them adventure travel (G Adventures). Sadly, we also use Criteo; thankfully adblockers block Tealium tag manager by default anyway.
When I saw OPs article screenshots, I actually suspected that Criteo had harvested the email address from the Forgot Your Password screen. This isn't uncommon – VE Interactive (I've mentioned them before), reads forms for email address fields and onBlur, they capture it and send marketing emails later. I _think_ this type of behaviour is supposed to be limited to cart abandonment situations, but I'll bet an incorrectly configured tag would target all forms.
Most ad blocker do not block Tealium by default. For blockers such as Adblock Plus or AdBlock, one must explicitly enable EasyPrivacy (which is enabled by default in uBlock Origin).
This really works, too.
Fuck off.
<some_email> ERROR:550 You've been banned from sending spam to this address, spamming bastard!!
And yeah, swearing at spambots is oddly cathartic.
eg not the "normal" recruiters who have a clue, but the ones who just email everything through regardless "just in case".
I had a lengthy discussion with one of the managing directors (Nick Rapley) of such an organisation ("RBW Consulting LLP" here in the UK) recently. He goes out of his way to defend their approach, as if the anti-spam laws don't apply to his line of business. Just because some small % of people might actually be convinced to say Yes.
(that is literally the same justification every other spammer uses)
Ironically... he told me to stop wasting his time. Like... hello, pot calling kettle black. :/
Computerphile recently did a similar example of cudahashcat using a variety of strategies to break passwords. Their goal is to scare people into using better passwords, but the principle is identical to de-anonymising emails. Maybe it can help convince stubborn people?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7U-RbOKanYs
If nothing convinces the marketing guys, maybe it's time to pull rank and ask to see the CS degree they are basing their opinion on?
If they're interested in the truth, that'll be a pretty convincing illustration.
(For any avoidance of doubt - this comes say after explaining what the score is)
Also the retargeted ads that follow me everywhere now. MOST of them are for companies where I have ALREADY bought something, so they are wasting their ad spend on chasing an existing customer, not a likely prospect.
This has made me resolve to try and make the web a less shitty place, one web site at a time - and I have ensured that my web projects absolutely DO NOT have any popups or cross site tracking in there (aside from normal analytics that is only used in house).
[I accidentally mis-typed 'pop up' above but LOVE the Freudian slip so will leave it as-is].
They're not available for all browsers. Quite notably, Chrome on Android, and any application that incorporates the Chrome core for its web presentation.
I've been thinking of creating a public uBlock filter list for websites with newsletter overlays/popups...
We seriously need to band together and stop this shit. It is absolutely infuriating. Who in the world wants to visit a website and then be stopped with a huge ad to join your stupid fucking mailing list? And I'm sure they point to their 2% conversion rate as proof that it works. What they don't know is the other 98% of people cannot fucking STAND it.
I was told it voided my Internet warranty....
You subscribe to website X, you opt-in to offers from third-parties, and this allows X to share your e-mail address with Criteo. Then Criteo sends you marketing e-mails for the account of Sears (but they surely don't share any PII with Sears - the e-mail is sent by Criteo).
The logic isn't that "browsing Sears is considered as having a preexisting business relationship with them". It's because users opted-in to third-party communications from a website they may have signed up with, back in 2008.
Other similar use cases include sending you an e-mail for website X when you browse website Y because they know you are in front of a computer/phone and this increases chances of opening e-mails.
Doesn't make it more or less "right" though and it's surely very surprising for users, myself included.
(On a tangent, what still looks like a legal gray area to me are the Data Management Platforms (DMP) - everyone shares user data in a big bucket/database provided by a common partner, all users are identified with IDs but not directly with PII, how much data can companies push/pull legally?)
[1] Not a lawyer but worked with legal teams on these topics. Laws still differ slightly depending on the European country you're talking about, but the GDPR will soon be unifying data privacy regulations. Right now the French and German Data Privacy regulations are some of the most restrictive ones.
I'd much rather lawyers just kept of the internet entirely.
That is nothing so much against lawyers, the are essential in the real world where land is a finite resource.
But the better solution to problems in an environment when CPU ticks are not a finite resource, and bandwidth is nowhere near capacity are technical and educational problems, not legal ones.
"Tamarind" == "Throw-Away Mail Alias Randomization Is Not Defeatable"
:)
http://www.kylheku.com/cgit/tamarind/tree/README
I log in with my IMAP4 user name and password, and then get a simple UI with a table of my aliases, and attached memo strings (which can contain URL's that get converted to links). I can edit these, change their order (select multiple, move to top or bottom, etc) create new ones and delete. When I create an alias, it goes "live" instantly, and when I delete one, it goes dead. Dead means that the address is "unroutable" at the SMTP level; it bounces.
I keep a few aliases from Tamarind in my wallet, in case I have to hand out an e-mail address in "3D life" to some untrustworthy outfit to be eligible for some promo or whatever.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_(mail_filtering_language...
You can use any word @wasteland.rfc822.org as a an email address, and then look into the inbox of the same name, without any password. I tend to use it for services that want my email address, but from which I don't want any emails, and don't want to maintain permanent accounts with.
Looking at a mostly random example, http://wasteland.rfc822.org/cgi-bin/inbox?inbox=foo it seems to have received about 20 spam mails and one or at most two legitimate signup mails.
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.
[0] https://gmail.googleblog.com/2008/03/2-hidden-ways-to-get-mo...
The spreadsheet doesn't have to be that complex. Just treat the spaces between letters as bits. Dot is 1, no dot is 0. Suddenly, an e-mail temporal@example.com has 128 different variants, and your spreadsheet may just be a numbered list of companies :).
I use a subdomain with catch-all, like me.example.com. Everybody is fine with subdomains and then I can use companyname@me.example.com. Using that format doesn't expose my actual e-mail address and makes it easy to filter (if match companyname, immediately bin and never tell me).
For me, the actual email problem isn't huge - my first line of defense is giving out a burner email unless I want the primary site to be able to contact me. So I don't expect to get truly hammered with spam, and just want a way to know what happened if someone does sell the address.
The invalidation issue is a bigger one, and a subdomain is certainly a better solution for it. Disposable emails and the + notation are nice for people who either don't want to leave gmail, or are bound to it via college or company email system. They aren't the best cure, though.
Additionally you cannot send an email from foobar+dontspamme@gmail.com. If you aggressively use the + character for legitimate signups but need customer support they may not be able to find your account as easily (e.g. "we couldn't find an account associated with e-mail foobar@gmail.com").
Um. Why not?
I have thought of a similar technique but this time using a period that would float between all the letters I have in my username. Any emails sent to an address without the period gets autodeleted.
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.
I started this after learning about the filter bubble but I've noticed how helpful it is when searching on Amazon, Wayfair, or Sears. I get non-machine-learned results every time while my wife using her primary browser with cookies often cannot see the same results I do. If I find something on Amazon, I copy-paste the URL without the ?query-string and replace 'www' with 'smile'. It seems like a hassle but it's no different from cleaning your feet before stepping inside the house after playing in the park.
This post just highlights that my practice to avoid unpermitted-profile-building-and-linking is for a good reason. I also have my own @example.com domain that I use and have certainly caught companies selling my info. However, even without being emailed, I don't want algorithms the determine what is best for me based on criteria I choose not to share.
I mean, you can make that exact argument about every annoying thing you have to do that wastes 1-5 minutes of your time. But over time, especially as a software programmer, if you don't automate those away, it really hurts your productivity.
If you dislike surveillance capitalism enough to write an essay about it, think about where you're publishing it.
I can't think of another business that has this kind of insane amount of easy-to-start interaction that results in so much activity and yet can claim zero culpability for any consequences. It's as if you purchased an airline ticket and the ticket came with a 17 page document attached where they spell out that by flying on this aircraft you agree to have tickets pre-planned in your name for 24 other flights, the plane may or may not make a stop off in 6 airports en route to your destination, the pilot occasionally likes to do barrel rolls and loops but he's real good at it so don't worry, and by the way occasionally the engines fall off but you don't get to sue us if anything goes wrong. ENJOY YOUR FLIGHT
I legitimately would love to see how much identity theft can be traced back to these fly-by-night companies and their shady ass practices.
Go to Options in Firefox under Privacy, and set "Accept Third Party Cookies" to "Never".
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/enable-and-disable-cook...
I also tell Twitter that every ad they show me is offensive. Because they are.
Yes, I am aware this is a fool's errand.
Example that tripped up bogofilter:
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This limited-time offer is available July 1, 2016 through September 30, 2016.
Gap, Old Navy and Banana Republic gift cards have no expiration or maintenance fees, and can be
used at the following Gap Inc. brand stores and websites: Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, and
Athleta. Limit 5 gift cards redeemable per online transaction. Gift cards are redeemable for
merchandise only, cannot be replaced if lost or stolen, and may not be redeemed with certain
promotional offers. Restricted to use in the USA, Canada and Puerto Rico.The thing is, I am never, ever interested in receiving marketing emails. Every single time, without doubt, I opt out of marketing emails. So if I receive one it means that one of these things holds true:
1. It's just spam
2. The website used some dark pattern to trick me into subscribing to something I did not want to
3. The website assumed consent and didn't bother asking
Guess what -- I'm perfectly fine burning all of this crap with a spam filter. It's a waste of time, and time is my most precious asset.
> Let’s ignore the fact that they assume Sears had my consent (they didn’t).
Just a note: I think what Criteo is saying here is that you gave permission to some third party to use your email for marketing purposes and to share it with their "partners", not that you gave Sears permission to use it. But they shared it with Criteo and Criteo shared it with Sears (or sent the email on their behalf) so technically there is "consent". (Of course in practice it's often possible to supposedly give such consent without ever realizing what you're opting into.)
I wish I had set something like this up before falling in for the Ron Paul hype in 2008 (sue me, I was 19). Got untold heaps of junk from those jerks for years before I got it under control.
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.
No no no. Handing over your email address to an online advertiser is a horrible idea. Do not engage them. Blacklist their content, their cookies, via whatever means you want (I use adblock) and be done with them.
An article that discusses tracking via online advertising but doesn’t discuss blocking is very suspicious. The most powerful tool against the problem isn't worth even a mention?
There should be a new class - or race - added to fantasy worlds. The Marketers. More evil than demons, undeader than the Lich King. Their gameplay mechanics would be based around earning gold by draining their own souls, as well as the souls of characters around them. Their primary combat role would be casting annoying debuff spells at everyone around, friend and foe alike.
Seriously though, this article basically says that someone out there has reached another level in insidiousness. If it was an MMO, we could at least form a raiding party and get rid of the problem once and for all.
DD-WRT: https://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Ad_blocking
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/v9l7zvlyynvl1pskbwssmq
Uses dnsmasq for instant query caching.
I have exactly one email address that I use for Amazon, and I've never used it elsewhere for anything else.
I occasionally receive emails from vendors (through the vendors' mail servers themselves, not remailed through Amazon per mail headers) at Amazon that I have bought things from (via one-click) as gifts and I am 100% sure I never gave them my email address or replied to any email from them.
An example vendor is a large outdoor clothing store that I bought a North Face jacket for a relative from. I'm now on their mailing list. In the ultimate irony, I could just click unsubscribe but it's actually good stuff ;)
Thanks, Amazon.
This is why I use my entire domain as my email address (i.e. *@example.com is routed to my inbox). This makes it trivial to hand out a unique address every time I fill out a form.
If any spam arrives that is addressed to "vendor.com@example.com", it's obvious who sold their email db. Bonus: it's easy to filter out spam when the spammer is sending to a unique address.
Some have been explicitly aloud because I trust them, like google analytics. But other google cookies are prohibited, like plus.google.com. Facebook is explicitly blocked. Doubleclick is blocked. some websites will not work if certain third parties are blocked, so i have to explicitly allow them once i realize the problem.
root@router:/tmp# grep criteo hosts0
0.0.0.0 cas.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 dis.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 dis.eu.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 dis.ny.us.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 dis.sv.us.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 dis.us.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 ld2.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 rta.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 rtax.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 sapatoru.widget.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 sslwidget.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 static.criteo.net
0.0.0.0 static.eu.criteo.net
0.0.0.0 widget.criteo.com
0.0.0.0 www.criteo.com
Deets: https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/v9l7zvlyynvl1pskbwssmq
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.
For big sites I cannot boycott, I simply register a new email address with them (i.e. <website><number>@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.
Isn't this the root problem here? It is hard to see how you could even start to fix this sort of thing without fixing the spam law first.
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.
Browsing the web any other way is for schnooks.
She browsed a few specialist wedding sites for inspiration and when she went to to some well known retail sites to start pricing things they seemed to know she was getting married and promoted wedding goods and services on their front page to her.
It freaked her out no end. I suggested a few plugins that seemed to put a stop to it. But a few weeks later she did start getting wedding related snail mail spam.
Its very creepy, especially after the whole Target teenage pregnancy thing.
Let me tell you how much fun it was to still be getting "free Enfamil baby formula" spam for a year after she had a miscarriage.
Does annoying people into something actually work? I feel like it must since its so prolific.
I wish there was a way to block these.
Related: I know that it's possible to "opt out" via the Direct Marketing Association communications (https://dmachoice.thedma.org/), but have thus far not done this as I assume I'll just get more junk mail.
Not behind an overlay, or with a adblock redirector or when the user-agent has 'googlebot' in it.
If you send the bits over, then I may consume them with no additional payment, whether via ads or mailing-list or account signups.
That said, someone in the comments stated how these companies actively avoid those who might click 'report spam', so this might work.
As for the message itself, if their intent is to sell you that specific item you searched for, they should say so. Of course, they need to avoid the creepy-factor, which, along with laziness are the two reasons they may have ended up with the junky message you received.
I disagree. This sounds like the rationalization marketing folks put forward, namely that they're actually helping people. No, they are not. At best, they're shoving messages into peoples' faces. At worst, they're shoving poisonous radioactive garbage messages full of lies into peoples's faces. The range of behaviour here is from mildly annoying to outright malicious. Very rare is the case when unsolicited marketing messages are something people are actually happy about.
I'd also like to add that as punishment for insulting the Sears marketing team, I got a piece of spam from them 20 minutes after my comment.
Reaction like this one make me think: entitled.
But they also make me think: unrealistic. How much should hypertargeted ads really bother us? Call me when they are using my bank account and medical records to show me ads. Not my browsing history, over whose exposure I have complete control, and which doesn't really expose very much about me or my family.