Hacker News Reader

Comment by fabbari | Hacker News Reader

My solution to this is to always use '+' email addresses - IE: "fabs+hulu@domain.com" - and I filter out all e-mails that don't have the '+' suffix as the recipient.

This way dropping the suffix drops those e-mails in my spam folder. Them normalizing the address makes my spam filter more efficient - and I would like to thank them for it.

View on HN

It's not about sending email. They hash the normalized email and use the hash to track activity across websites and services to build user profiles for real-time ad bids.

Fancy that, this requires an explicit opt in by GDPR.

That hasn't stopped them before: https://iapp.org/news/a/belgian-dpa-fines-iab-europe-250k-eu...

And of course with such a small fine it's basically guaranteed they will continue breaching it since it makes them way more money.

In theory yes; in practice, they'll track you anyway because it's not a crime unless you're found out, sued, and don't survive the lawsuit.

I'm sure there's a lot of "underground" data transactions happening where the source of data is obfuscated.

Facebook (of all places!) is one of the few companies that makes this transparent.

If you have a Facebook account, and live in GDPR-land, go check which companies illegally passed on your data (https://www.facebook.com/adpreferences/ad_settings -> Audience based advertising) and report them!

Step 1 in defending your privacy: Sign up to Facebook and give them your data.

Back when I actually used my Gmail account, I found LOTS of sites that would refuse to accept an email address with a + in it. I attributed this to a mixture of incompetence and active malice.

These days I host my own mail server and use . as the sseparator, which has been working well for years.

more likely the js snippet or regex they C&P from the interwebs disallowed it.

> incompetence

I stopped doing this after I encountered a website that accepted + in the registration form but not the email confirmation.

Them normalizing those addresses will allow them to track you across all involved parties, however.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com