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Recently, a website I had only visited once somehow cross-referenced the cookies available through my browser to work out my email address & directly emailed me

by pja 5y ago

Recently, a website I had only visited once somehow cross-referenced the cookies available through my browser to work out my email address & directly emailed me to invite me to sign up for their services. This has to be a GDPR violation, I certainly didn’t give consent for them to email me, but people are still doing this kind of thing apparently.

segmondy 5y ago
For years I had a professional email and a non-pro email address that I kept separated. Personal email for job applications/linkedin/bills etc, non-pro for regular surfing. It's worked great until last year. I think it's Google cuz I login from the same browser/device, but they eventually linked it and I'm now being contacted by recruiters via my non-pro email which pretty much unmasks me and my social media accounts. To really have any kind of anonymity today, you pretty much have to hide as if a nation-state actor is after you.
- Saint_Genet 5y ago
  I don't ever log in to my personal accounts on my work computer/phone or vice versa. Another perk of having a work only phone is that I can leave it at work or turn it off when not working.
- moksly 5y ago
  I abandoned having a free (as in beer) mail account around the time google started doing their own advertising in gmail. At first I went for the ideology approach of fastmail, then tutanota/proton mail and finally runbox (or whatever the Norwegian service is called, which was my favorite by the way), but I just couldn’t live with going from gmail to any of those, and so I ended up with gsuite. When google decided to make having a gsuite for private usage harder, I switched to Office365 where I still have the smallest “only in browser” package. I have to say that whole outlook isn’t as good as gmail, all the things evolving spam is super easy to handle with policies. I still have my old gmail address forwarding things that google would sort into “this is the relevant mails” part of its new inbox system, and 90% of it goes directly into my “unwanted stuff” or clutter or whatever it’s called in outlook. As a benefit it also gave me a TB of storage and in browser office, and while I don’t use the office stuff much, I do use one drive to backup my photos because iCloud storage frankly is almost as expensive as the entire office365 account.
- cosmie 5y ago
  I doubt it was Google itself – Google is a one-way sieve when it comes to data. Google allows advertisers to tap into their user graph for targeting and attribution, but they don't actually give access to user-level info in any meaningful form, let alone in a form that would allow you to get your hands on user emails. The closest you can get is Ads Data Hub[1], which requires advertisers to import their first party data into the (very expensive) Google-controlled environment to work, and is designed so that Google's identifiers can be used for joins and aggregate functions but can't be directly returned in queries. There are providers that directly exploit their graph by selling the PII within it, such as GetEmails[2] (and the publishers they source data from). But Google isn't one of them. [1] https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub [2] https://martech.zone/getemails-identify-anonymous-visitors/ https://martech.zone/getemails-identify-anonymous-visitors/
  - pja 5y ago
    I agree: it won’t have been Google (and the email came to a non-Google email address), but some data aggregator somewhere who is cross referencing login emails with stored cookies.
cosmie 5y ago
I haven't had exposure to this space since the GDPR went into effect, but it used to be trivially easy to do this. A quick Googling shows there are still providers of this sort of service, such as GetEmails[1] which bills itself as '100% compliant in the US'. [1] https://getemails.com/ https://getemails.com/
da_big_ghey 5y ago
If company has no operation in Europe it is not realistic for to enforce GDPR against. This are true for many company and it not is a surprise that some do not care on any GDPR restrict.

by pja 5y ago

segmondy 5y ago

For years I had a professional email and a non-pro email address that I kept separated. Personal email for job applications/linkedin/bills etc, non-pro for regular surfing. It's worked great until last year. I think it's Google cuz I login from the same browser/device, but they eventually linked it and I'm now being contacted by recruiters via my non-pro email which pretty much unmasks me and my social media accounts. To really have any kind of anonymity today, you pretty much have to hide as if a nation-state actor is after you.

Saint_Genet 5y ago
I don't ever log in to my personal accounts on my work computer/phone or vice versa. Another perk of having a work only phone is that I can leave it at work or turn it off when not working.
moksly 5y ago
I abandoned having a free (as in beer) mail account around the time google started doing their own advertising in gmail. At first I went for the ideology approach of fastmail, then tutanota/proton mail and finally runbox (or whatever the Norwegian service is called, which was my favorite by the way), but I just couldn’t live with going from gmail to any of those, and so I ended up with gsuite. When google decided to make having a gsuite for private usage harder, I switched to Office365 where I still have the smallest “only in browser” package. I have to say that whole outlook isn’t as good as gmail, all the things evolving spam is super easy to handle with policies. I still have my old gmail address forwarding things that google would sort into “this is the relevant mails” part of its new inbox system, and 90% of it goes directly into my “unwanted stuff” or clutter or whatever it’s called in outlook. As a benefit it also gave me a TB of storage and in browser office, and while I don’t use the office stuff much, I do use one drive to backup my photos because iCloud storage frankly is almost as expensive as the entire office365 account.
cosmie 5y ago
I doubt it was Google itself – Google is a one-way sieve when it comes to data. Google allows advertisers to tap into their user graph for targeting and attribution, but they don't actually give access to user-level info in any meaningful form, let alone in a form that would allow you to get your hands on user emails. The closest you can get is Ads Data Hub[1], which requires advertisers to import their first party data into the (very expensive) Google-controlled environment to work, and is designed so that Google's identifiers can be used for joins and aggregate functions but can't be directly returned in queries. There are providers that directly exploit their graph by selling the PII within it, such as GetEmails[2] (and the publishers they source data from). But Google isn't one of them. [1] https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub https://developers.google.com/ads-data-hub [2] https://martech.zone/getemails-identify-anonymous-visitors/ https://martech.zone/getemails-identify-anonymous-visitors/
- pja 5y ago
  I agree: it won’t have been Google (and the email came to a non-Google email address), but some data aggregator somewhere who is cross referencing login emails with stored cookies.

cosmie 5y ago

I haven't had exposure to this space since the GDPR went into effect, but it used to be trivially easy to do this. A quick Googling shows there are still providers of this sort of service, such as GetEmails[1] which bills itself as '100% compliant in the US'. [1] https://getemails.com/ https://getemails.com/

da_big_ghey 5y ago

If company has no operation in Europe it is not realistic for to enforce GDPR against. This are true for many company and it not is a surprise that some do not care on any GDPR restrict.