Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!
Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!
-
Congratulations IamaSherpa on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!
Privacy in our e-mail
- Thread starter rainny
- Start date
From Slai (web developer)
Hi there,
I'm totally agreed with you, everyday I'll receive a number of junk mail that selling me the product I never heard orseen it before or from the company I never been visited too. How's did they get my e-mail address?
Our privacy is in danger. Companies collect, compile and sell information about us without our permission. They make billions of dollars from selling our private lives to people who annoy us, trick us, discriminate against us and cause us to lose time and money.
Our names and addresses are sold for over $5 billion every year to direct mailers who use it to send us junk mail. Our telephone numbers are sold to telemarketers who interrupt our family dinners with junk calls. Millions of email addresses are sold to spammers and we get a hundred of junk emails and pay to download them.
The law should prevent anyone from selling our personal information without our permission. It is not us who should have to opt out of every such potential sale - it should be up to those who want to sell our names to get our permission first. Once they need to get our permission, they will also need to justify it to us, and pay us the royalties too
Hi there,
I'm totally agreed with you, everyday I'll receive a number of junk mail that selling me the product I never heard orseen it before or from the company I never been visited too. How's did they get my e-mail address?
Our privacy is in danger. Companies collect, compile and sell information about us without our permission. They make billions of dollars from selling our private lives to people who annoy us, trick us, discriminate against us and cause us to lose time and money.
Our names and addresses are sold for over $5 billion every year to direct mailers who use it to send us junk mail. Our telephone numbers are sold to telemarketers who interrupt our family dinners with junk calls. Millions of email addresses are sold to spammers and we get a hundred of junk emails and pay to download them.
The law should prevent anyone from selling our personal information without our permission. It is not us who should have to opt out of every such potential sale - it should be up to those who want to sell our names to get our permission first. Once they need to get our permission, they will also need to justify it to us, and pay us the royalties too
Guest_imported
New member
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
Web servers' cookie is one of the major reason why you get a lot of junk mail. Some comment by programmer.
Imagine that your remote control informed stations the second you switched to them, and that they could sell this information to their advertisers to help them decide what junk mail to send you.
How they can identify you individually and how you can protect your identity from being discovered and sold. Don't let them use your browser as a tool of surveillance. Stop them now.
Your browser is probably revealing more than you might want: which computer you are coming from, what software and hardware you are using, details of the link you clicked on, and possibly even your email address.
If your ISP is running an identd demon, or if you leave certain IRC clients running while you surf, servers can ask for your identity at the time your browser requests a page.
How they can find out who you are - all they may need is your email address because various databases let them look up your name and address from it.
People often type their email or postal address into forms, when registering at a site or requesting information.
Some browsers that include a mail handler disclose the user's email address in certain situations, such as when requesting a file by FTP, which you can do simply by clicking on a link that happens to begin ftp: rather than http. You can tell your browser not to do this.
Cookies tell them it's you every time you click - many organizations use ``cookies'' to track your every move on their site. A cookie is a unique identifier that a web server places on your computer: a serial number for you personally that can be used to retrieve your records from their databases. It's usually a string of random-looking letters long enough to be unique. They are kept in a file called cookies or cookies.txt or MagicCookie in your browser directory/folder. They are also known as ``persistent cookies'' because they may last for years, even if you change ISP or upgrade your browser.
If you look at your cookies file you may see the names of web sites that you have never heard of. They were probably put there by companies that resell advertising space from a large number of popular sites. Those ad placement companies maintain huge databases recording details of who looks at which pages. The larger ones have cookies in place on millions of peoples' browsers. If you use one of the popular search engines, the queries you type are probably being logged and analyzed too. We wonder whether some companies are selling your identity as part of the package.
Any web site that knows your identity and has cookie for you could set up procedures to exchange their data with the companies that buy advertising space from them, synchronizing the cookies they both have on your computer. This possibility means that once your identity becomes known to a single company listed in your cookies file, any of the others might know who you are every time you visit their sites.
The result is that a web site about gardening that you never told your name could sell not only your name, personal information and e-mail address to mail-order companies, but also the fact that you spent a lot of time one Saturday night last June reading about how to fertilize roses. More disturbing scenarios along the same lines could be imagined.
There are of course many beneficial and legitimate uses for cookies, as Netscape explains. They also allow ``mass customization'' of the content on web sites. But it's not generally possible to tell from looking at a cookie alone how it will be used. Because of the possibilities of misuse we recommend stopping cookies except for sites where you really need them.
Imagine that your remote control informed stations the second you switched to them, and that they could sell this information to their advertisers to help them decide what junk mail to send you.
How they can identify you individually and how you can protect your identity from being discovered and sold. Don't let them use your browser as a tool of surveillance. Stop them now.
Your browser is probably revealing more than you might want: which computer you are coming from, what software and hardware you are using, details of the link you clicked on, and possibly even your email address.
If your ISP is running an identd demon, or if you leave certain IRC clients running while you surf, servers can ask for your identity at the time your browser requests a page.
How they can find out who you are - all they may need is your email address because various databases let them look up your name and address from it.
People often type their email or postal address into forms, when registering at a site or requesting information.
Some browsers that include a mail handler disclose the user's email address in certain situations, such as when requesting a file by FTP, which you can do simply by clicking on a link that happens to begin ftp: rather than http. You can tell your browser not to do this.
Cookies tell them it's you every time you click - many organizations use ``cookies'' to track your every move on their site. A cookie is a unique identifier that a web server places on your computer: a serial number for you personally that can be used to retrieve your records from their databases. It's usually a string of random-looking letters long enough to be unique. They are kept in a file called cookies or cookies.txt or MagicCookie in your browser directory/folder. They are also known as ``persistent cookies'' because they may last for years, even if you change ISP or upgrade your browser.
If you look at your cookies file you may see the names of web sites that you have never heard of. They were probably put there by companies that resell advertising space from a large number of popular sites. Those ad placement companies maintain huge databases recording details of who looks at which pages. The larger ones have cookies in place on millions of peoples' browsers. If you use one of the popular search engines, the queries you type are probably being logged and analyzed too. We wonder whether some companies are selling your identity as part of the package.
Any web site that knows your identity and has cookie for you could set up procedures to exchange their data with the companies that buy advertising space from them, synchronizing the cookies they both have on your computer. This possibility means that once your identity becomes known to a single company listed in your cookies file, any of the others might know who you are every time you visit their sites.
The result is that a web site about gardening that you never told your name could sell not only your name, personal information and e-mail address to mail-order companies, but also the fact that you spent a lot of time one Saturday night last June reading about how to fertilize roses. More disturbing scenarios along the same lines could be imagined.
There are of course many beneficial and legitimate uses for cookies, as Netscape explains. They also allow ``mass customization'' of the content on web sites. But it's not generally possible to tell from looking at a cookie alone how it will be used. Because of the possibilities of misuse we recommend stopping cookies except for sites where you really need them.
slai and rainy, go to to see that stormguard IS right
be aware not only of cookies but also of server side processing, and disable java AND javascript and do not download/install/let run any applet or "object", and if you use ie do not fill out the "email adress" and "name" and stuff like that in your browser's options
of course you won't be able to reach most of the sites but hey, if you want to protect your privacy that's the only way to (actually that's what i do when i surf)
oh and stormguard didn't tell about doucleclick and such, who are using the same id for you but on a lot of different sites - so they know that in june you looked in the gardening site how to fertilize your rose, and that the next day you bought roses from ANOTHER site, and the day before you bought cat food and some days after you were looking on a site to find a bay name ... ....
also, there are many "cookie blocker" you can download
be aware not only of cookies but also of server side processing, and disable java AND javascript and do not download/install/let run any applet or "object", and if you use ie do not fill out the "email adress" and "name" and stuff like that in your browser's options
of course you won't be able to reach most of the sites but hey, if you want to protect your privacy that's the only way to (actually that's what i do when i surf)
oh and stormguard didn't tell about doucleclick and such, who are using the same id for you but on a lot of different sites - so they know that in june you looked in the gardening site how to fertilize your rose, and that the next day you bought roses from ANOTHER site, and the day before you bought cat food and some days after you were looking on a site to find a bay name ... ....
also, there are many "cookie blocker" you can download
Guest_imported
New member
- Jan 1, 1970
- 0
Stormguard and Iza are correct in a technical way, this may be hard to understand by people without computer background. I would like to help explain in the other way.
Once your email address is on a spammer's list, it can be very hard to get off, especially if he's selling it. Here are some tips on how to stop spam before it starts.
Reduce your exposure to ``harvesting''
Don't display your email address(es) in public more than necessary, at least not in a form that's easy prey for scavenger bots (programs that spammers run to ``harvest'' email addresses).
If you publish web pages, don't put your address in a click-to-email link (HTML's HREF MAILTO). This means people have to cut-and-paste your address rather than emailing your with a single click, but it can save you a lot of spam.
Rather than putting your email address on every page of your site, it may be better to have it on only one page, with links to it. Many spammers don't even bother to remove duplicates from their lists.
If your address appears on a very well-indexed site you might want to use one of the many common tactics to disguise it from scavenger bots, (such as splitting the components of the address as Junkbusters does on its feedback page), or inserting HTML code in the middle of the address (as JUNKBUSTERS SPAMOFF does).
If you post to Usenet or chat, consider disguising your address. There are dozens of ways of doing this so that humans who really want to contact you can figure out how to do so: look at a few postings and choose one you like. We have heard reports that some harvesters are already wise to addresses such as me@nospam.myisp.com so try a variation on the nospam. There are plenty of adjectives that could be added. Of course almost any method can be thwarted by sufficiently intelligent scavenger bots, but most of them aren't very smart.
An alternative is getting a free forwarding address from companies such as Bigfoot.com or NetAddress.com. Many of them include free filtering facilities.
Choosing an alias or email address that begins with a letter late in the alphabet may reduce the amount of spam you get, because many lists are sold sorted in alphabetical order, and spamming sessions are often terminated before they complete.
Lucent's LPWA has an innovative system for producing ``revokable'' email aliases that can be used when submitting your address in forms on a web site.
Check your browsing isn't giving you away - In a very small number of cases, your email address may be discovered by a web site you visit. This has occurred through bugs in places such as Web-based email services. Early versions of some browsers gave away email addresses routinely. A quick and easy way to check for this is to visit our privacy check page that displays these headers. If your address is being disclosed, reconfigure your browser or use a free product such as Internet Junkbuster to block it.
Check that your ISP or company isn't running the identd demon, a background program that Web servers can ask for your user ID while you wait for a page. It was originally intended to restrict access to authorized users, but spamming sites can use it to guess your email address. Our test lets you quickly find out whether your identity is being revealed in this way.
Some larger companies sell or give away email addresses. Most have policies and terms that prohibit use of their information for spamming, but this doesn't seem to stop some spammers.
You can tell email lookup services such as those listed in Yahoo to remove your name and email address.
Some of the giant companies that sell mailing lists to catalog companies are now also selling email addresses. Most of these don't have Web-based ``opt-out'' forms, but JUNKBUSTERS DECLARATION gives you an easy way to draft physical letters to them.
The threat of litigation is the basic idea behind many anti-spam tactics. A carefully-worded ``offer'' to receive spam for a fee of $10 per piece is provided in JUNKBUSTERS SPAMOFF for anyone to use in reply to spammers. You can even publish it on your Web space if you wish. Ten dollars is an amount which can be the subject of a suit in small claims court, giving everyone a credible way to sue spammers. Other commonly used legal threats include claims that spam is an unsolicited fax under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and statements that spam will be interpreted as an order for proofreading services.
Once your email address is on a spammer's list, it can be very hard to get off, especially if he's selling it. Here are some tips on how to stop spam before it starts.
Reduce your exposure to ``harvesting''
Don't display your email address(es) in public more than necessary, at least not in a form that's easy prey for scavenger bots (programs that spammers run to ``harvest'' email addresses).
If you publish web pages, don't put your address in a click-to-email link (HTML's HREF MAILTO). This means people have to cut-and-paste your address rather than emailing your with a single click, but it can save you a lot of spam.
Rather than putting your email address on every page of your site, it may be better to have it on only one page, with links to it. Many spammers don't even bother to remove duplicates from their lists.
If your address appears on a very well-indexed site you might want to use one of the many common tactics to disguise it from scavenger bots, (such as splitting the components of the address as Junkbusters does on its feedback page), or inserting HTML code in the middle of the address (as JUNKBUSTERS SPAMOFF does).
If you post to Usenet or chat, consider disguising your address. There are dozens of ways of doing this so that humans who really want to contact you can figure out how to do so: look at a few postings and choose one you like. We have heard reports that some harvesters are already wise to addresses such as me@nospam.myisp.com so try a variation on the nospam. There are plenty of adjectives that could be added. Of course almost any method can be thwarted by sufficiently intelligent scavenger bots, but most of them aren't very smart.
An alternative is getting a free forwarding address from companies such as Bigfoot.com or NetAddress.com. Many of them include free filtering facilities.
Choosing an alias or email address that begins with a letter late in the alphabet may reduce the amount of spam you get, because many lists are sold sorted in alphabetical order, and spamming sessions are often terminated before they complete.
Lucent's LPWA has an innovative system for producing ``revokable'' email aliases that can be used when submitting your address in forms on a web site.
Check your browsing isn't giving you away - In a very small number of cases, your email address may be discovered by a web site you visit. This has occurred through bugs in places such as Web-based email services. Early versions of some browsers gave away email addresses routinely. A quick and easy way to check for this is to visit our privacy check page that displays these headers. If your address is being disclosed, reconfigure your browser or use a free product such as Internet Junkbuster to block it.
Check that your ISP or company isn't running the identd demon, a background program that Web servers can ask for your user ID while you wait for a page. It was originally intended to restrict access to authorized users, but spamming sites can use it to guess your email address. Our test lets you quickly find out whether your identity is being revealed in this way.
Some larger companies sell or give away email addresses. Most have policies and terms that prohibit use of their information for spamming, but this doesn't seem to stop some spammers.
You can tell email lookup services such as those listed in Yahoo to remove your name and email address.
Some of the giant companies that sell mailing lists to catalog companies are now also selling email addresses. Most of these don't have Web-based ``opt-out'' forms, but JUNKBUSTERS DECLARATION gives you an easy way to draft physical letters to them.
The threat of litigation is the basic idea behind many anti-spam tactics. A carefully-worded ``offer'' to receive spam for a fee of $10 per piece is provided in JUNKBUSTERS SPAMOFF for anyone to use in reply to spammers. You can even publish it on your Web space if you wish. Ten dollars is an amount which can be the subject of a suit in small claims court, giving everyone a credible way to sue spammers. Other commonly used legal threats include claims that spam is an unsolicited fax under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, and statements that spam will be interpreted as an order for proofreading services.
- Thread starter
- #6
Hi you guys,
I'd like to say a big thank you to make it clear why I and my friends get bulk emaiils every day. Sometimes they come along with virus also. So, the one way to protect those email is be careful in surfing the Internet. Just one way? Please help me again.
Thanks so much
Rainny
I'd like to say a big thank you to make it clear why I and my friends get bulk emaiils every day. Sometimes they come along with virus also. So, the one way to protect those email is be careful in surfing the Internet. Just one way? Please help me again.
Thanks so much
Rainny
- Status
Similar threads
- Locked
- Question