I once clicked a link in a search engine to an LL Bean store page for a pair of gloves. I looked at the page for about 10 seconds and closed it. I didn’t click anything, create any accounts, or make any purchases. The following week, I received an LL Bean catalog in my mailbox, addressed to me by name. This is the world we live in today.
Another thing you should, or could do is signing up with a Gmail address and add the site name where you sign up for. You need to add a Plus + symbol behind your name, succeeded by the name of the site you sign up for, and before the @ mark.
For example: myname+blf@gmail.com
This only works for gmail though.
You can add the name of the website behind the + symbol, and all emails will be delivered to your email box myname@gmail.com
SO you can have:
myname+cpf@gmail.com ,
myname+banggood@gmail.com,
myname+gearbest@gmail.com,
If any of these vendors sell your email address, you should be able to see WHO sold your email address since you added their site name to your email address.
Sometimes I can’t believe that generations of people alive right now lived through having their name, address and phone number published publicly. Not sure when their feelings shifted so much.
It used to be quite expensive to copy info out of phone books, transfer it to paper, stick it on junk mail and pay postage to deliver it to people.
The problem isn’t that the information became available.
The problem is that it became dirt cheap to use it, leading to a vast proliferation of junk mail.
Equifax breach and others have put out a lot worse than that. My college alumni magazine once printed mailing labels with Social Security #s on them. Yahoo, Target, etc., the list goes on.
I have a domain registered through Google, that I use as an email forward. Anything that gets sent to anything @mysupersecretdomain.com gets forwarded to an email address I use.
This way if I am asked for an email address somewhere, I can make one up off the top of my head, or usually the name of the company asking for my email, and I can see when that email address gets shared.
For example, I signed up at Neal’s Gadgets with an email address of ng@ whatever my domain is.com, and noticed that I’m getting emails from Indigo Temple to that address. Never used it anywhere else.
Up until last year the US government would send out Medicare information with your Social Security number and DOB on it in many cases. Yeap really secure there.