Acebeam sending mail to my personal email address.

[hank]

… people alive right now lived through having their name, address and phone number published publicly

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.

Cheaper than dirt, really.

Spam earns senders around $7,000 per day.
With so few people clicking, what’s the motivation behind email spam campaigns? Well, research has found that spammers don’t need a ton of clicks to maintain a rather profitable business model.
… with only one response per 12.5 million messages sent, spammers earn around $3.5 million from spam email over the course of one year.

100 Known Spam Operations responsible for 80% of your spam.

80% of spam received by Internet users in North America and Europe can be traced via aliases, addresses, redirects, locations of servers, domains and dns setups, to around 100 known spam operations listed in the ROKSO database.

https://www.spamhaus.org/rokso/

[pennzy]

@BurningPlayd0h

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.

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.

[Minocc]

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.

[SIGShooter]

@pennzy

@BurningPlayd0h

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.

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.

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.

[Joshk]

@Minocc

… 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.

The reasons not to buy from Neal’s Gadgets just keep growing by the day.

[mortuus]

they need to stop doing this.

[Lightbringer]

@hIKARInoob

@varbos

But even then, if you know that eg Bangood has leaked your address, what are you going to do ? Write a stern email ?

Well, they might offer you 10 BG points.

Only after you send pictures and then a video of the problem.

[hIKARInoob]

@Lightbringer

@hIKARInoob

@varbos

But even then, if you know that eg Bangood has leaked your address, what are you going to do ? Write a stern email ?

Well, they might offer you 10 BG points.

Only after you send pictures and then a video of the problem.

Oooohhhhh I will sure send them a video worth 10 BG.

[BurningPlayd0h]

Life Pro-tip: Dispute EVERYTHING you can on your credit report. There are many circumstances that will get items removed if you dispute them, but employees of credit agencies are not allowed to inform you of these conditions.

@pennzy

@BurningPlayd0h

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.

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.

Equifax is probably the worst company/organization I have or will ever deal with in my life. Getting a certain verification number off my credit report from them, just to file a dispute took months.

I still think I only got resolution because whoever I finally spoke to on the phone was competent and had empathy for me.

I challenge anyone to find a single person who has been able to get their free online credit report from them, which is everyone’s right under federal law. They are scamming people into paying or waiting weeks or more for a mailed form (which didn’t even include the number Equifax said it would, and which I needed to file the dispute). Debt collection agencies are almost as bad, the one I filed a claim against said they had definitive proof of my debt but never provided me with that evidence and lost the dispute within a week of filing. A medical debt which was supposedly from when I was still a minor and they never contacted me to try and collect :person_facepalming:

@MyRants

@BurningPlayd0h

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.

When that information was spread farther and wider than any generations before had ever experienced.

Genuine question, what is the practical difference?