4 ms·

For non-personalized newsletters it's pretty useless for you to give out an email address. No one's ever gonna address you individually so all it creates are po

For non-personalized newsletters it's pretty useless for you to give out an email address. No one's ever gonna address you individually so all it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your real email address. The only benefit I can see even for non-personalized newsletters is that you have it in your mailbox and can use your normal email filtering tools to deal with newsletter messages.

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago
I guess I've just never really considered my email address as some kind of secret thing that warrants a privacy concern.
- t0astbread 6y ago
  Neither do I, really, but I would be concerned about newsletter hosts being able to build a profile of my interests based on what I'm subscribed to. If I can just use Atom/RSS over HTTP instead I can avoid that easily.
  - Fogest 6y ago
    This is why I like this site. Some sites I want to keep up to date on don't have an RSS feed, but they have a newsletter. I'm happy this site was shared and I am definitely going to make use of it!
bmj 6y ago
it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your real email address Is this the same class of privacy issue as, say, subscribing to a print journal that is delivered directly to your place of residence (as opposed to a post office box)? I think you could even argue that using anonymized email addresses for your newsletter subscriptions could be the digital equivalent of a PO box, right?
- t0astbread 6y ago
  I think we mean the same thing, yes. (See my response to a sibling about newsletter hosts building interest profiles[1].) The PO box analogy kinda falls apart unless you use a separate PO box per subscription but you're right, email aliases protect you from any kind of advertiser profiling. Feeds are just nice because they're simple HTTP requests so they don't have that problem in the first place (unless you're worried about IP-based tracking and don't use any kind of proxy). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26169411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26169411
- betwixthewires 6y ago
  I'd say, imagine that for material you want, you have to ask for it rather than someone just deciding to send you whatever they want to send you. RSS and Atom are basically ways to organize and automate requesting desired data on a schedule. This means that using these formats, nobody can send you junk that you don't want.

VWWHFSfQ 6y ago

I guess I've just never really considered my email address as some kind of secret thing that warrants a privacy concern.

t0astbread 6y ago
Neither do I, really, but I would be concerned about newsletter hosts being able to build a profile of my interests based on what I'm subscribed to. If I can just use Atom/RSS over HTTP instead I can avoid that easily.
- Fogest 6y ago
  This is why I like this site. Some sites I want to keep up to date on don't have an RSS feed, but they have a newsletter. I'm happy this site was shared and I am definitely going to make use of it!

bmj 6y ago

it creates are potential privacy issues if you give out your real email address Is this the same class of privacy issue as, say, subscribing to a print journal that is delivered directly to your place of residence (as opposed to a post office box)? I think you could even argue that using anonymized email addresses for your newsletter subscriptions could be the digital equivalent of a PO box, right?

t0astbread 6y ago
I think we mean the same thing, yes. (See my response to a sibling about newsletter hosts building interest profiles[1].) The PO box analogy kinda falls apart unless you use a separate PO box per subscription but you're right, email aliases protect you from any kind of advertiser profiling. Feeds are just nice because they're simple HTTP requests so they don't have that problem in the first place (unless you're worried about IP-based tracking and don't use any kind of proxy). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26169411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26169411
betwixthewires 6y ago
I'd say, imagine that for material you want, you have to ask for it rather than someone just deciding to send you whatever they want to send you. RSS and Atom are basically ways to organize and automate requesting desired data on a schedule. This means that using these formats, nobody can send you junk that you don't want.