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> My name is Maya Mishina, and I am a resident of Novosibirsk, Russia. If i received such an email, I would mark it as spam and move on with my life. Why did t

> My name is Maya Mishina, and I am a resident of Novosibirsk, Russia. If i received such an email, I would mark it as spam and move on with my life. Why did this blogger take it seriously? Does she take other forms of spam so seriously? I do feel for her stress and anxiety, but I also have to question her mental ability to filter noise. Life must be quite stressful for her overall.

dannyobrien 5y ago
I was contacted by my system administrator about this email, even though we chat roughly once a year; we get a lot of spam too but a legal threat is something you need to keep an eye on.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  > legal threat is something you need to keep an eye on. Yes but you still need to be judicious and critical.
  - dqv 5y ago
    The things I would look for in an illegitimate email are not there. Where are the typos? The poor use of language? It is a very well-crafted email. The address is maybe a little off, but tons of my legitimate clients have weird emails like this. It would have gotten my response... probably an hour of my time explaining how our policies work and how, yes, we would comply with their request even if the laws don't technically protect them. There isn't really a prefilled template you can respond to questions like this (if you actually care about responding inquiries like this) so I would have genuinely spent time thinking about the questions and giving them more than a yes and no.
akersten 5y ago
Fully agreed. I'm shocked she gave a random unsolicited emailer the time of day. Most problems are ones we create for ourselves. Responding to spam and then feeling like you've been the victim of some injustice that the spam didn't say "hey, I'm not really spam, I'm grad-student flavored spam" is quite a take. Here's a tip for anyone not running a business: If your response is legally required, it'll come in the physical mail. Don't take legal advice from spam, me, or your sysadmin.
- Aerroon 5y ago
  But these privacy laws do require a response when you collect data, no?
  - akersten 5y ago
    Not until you're collecting data at the scale where you'd have a legal@yourdomain team to forward anything that vaguely smells like a legal inquiry. Which is why my tip applied for "non-business" cases.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
      Is it reasonable to expect people to know that? If I'm below that level, what are the odds of me knowing the law well enough to know that it doesn't apply to me?
      - Godel_unicode 5y ago
        > Is it reasonable to expect people to know that? Yes. It's not hard.
        seebs 5y ago
        Do you think this applies in general to questions of legal liability, or is this one unique? If it's unique, why should anyone think that this case is unique? If you think in general it's "not hard" to know things about legal liability, either you're Elle Woods or you're an extremely overconfident fool.
- hattmall 5y ago
  Certified mail or trash, there's no way to even know if an email was really delivered to a recipient anyway. I'm aware of read receipts but they aren't reliable.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
ZhangSWEFAANG 5y ago
This is unlike traditional spam in the sense that it feels more legitimate.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  I think that’s relative to your experience. To me it is spam and I would not even finish reading it, let alone grace it with a reply.
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    What is your experience?
  - cgriswald 5y ago
    Isn’t that kind of the point? Your experience isn’t the relevant experience. Treating this email as spam is the obvious thing to do to you, but it is demonstrably not the case for others, the author included. Others don’t have access to your experiences.
- walrus01 5y ago
  In the modern scam era we live in, it somehow seems more legit because it mentions something in a specific article of legal code, and isn't demanding payment of your IRS taxes in iTunes gift cards.
- the_af 5y ago
  The start with some Russian woman saying "hello, I'm Masha from..." triggers all sort of mental spam filters. Adding random legal codes from who knows where reminds me of "according to the CANSPAM law 134/38 this cannot be considered spam" that every spam mail used to have. Seriously, just a few lines in this mail raises all sorts of flags.
walrus01 5y ago
I see emails from cranks all the time and similarly have a do-not-respond policy to any of them, but at the same time, something like this is very slightly worrisome because it seems to be presenting the non-zero chance that some random person will sue you in your local court system. Which even if it is completely nonsensical and has no basis in law, could cost thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response to a statement of claim. If you have ever seen the experiences of people who have been sued by sovereign citizens/freeman-on-the-land/"this is an admiralty flag" people, it would help to better understand the context I'm viewing it in.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  > very slightly worrisome Recommend you don’t spend “ thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response” on something that you find very slightly worrisome. Again, I think you, too, are being suckered into spam. Plenty of people fall for spam scams. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Think of all the people who fall for the fake IRS phone calls. But learn from it: keep your guard up when you get emails, phone calls, or text messages from strangers. Anything legally binding in the US will come to you via snail mail.
  - walrus01 5y ago
    > Anything legally binding in the US will come to you via snail mail. yes it will, but a really determined person with an axe to grind will very often make known their intentions well in advance of that. and no, it won't always come by snail mail, DMCA notices and similar with actual legal threats will arrive regularly via SMTP.
    - Godel_unicode 5y ago
      This is, of course, not true. Please stop.
      - walrus01 5y ago
        My job involves DMCA pass through compliance and I have several hundred of such threats from a myriad of sources sitting in an inbox right now which say otherwise. Perhaps you've never had thousands of people torrenting movies using you as a service provider before.
Zababa 5y ago
You omit the following line: > I have a few questions about your process for responding to California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) data access requests This is the worrying part.
- userbinator 5y ago
  A Russian with questions about California... If the first sentence didn't already raise your suspicion, the second one definitely should, and put it over the threshold for spam/scam.
  - dqv 5y ago
    Customers say weird shit in correspondence all the time and you have to fill in a lot of blanks. This would have easily imprinted “oh she lived in California at one point and wants to know if we’ll still comply with her requests” in customer service mode.
    - userbinator 5y ago
      The "is this even a customer" filter should catch that.
      - dqv 5y ago
        We're operating in reality where the answer to "is this even a customer" is often "unsure - to be determined", not an imagined scenario where software with 100% accuracy tells us when someone isn't.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
etataetaet 5y ago
I'm sorry but how can you make the assumption that "life must be quite stressful for her overall."? We know almost nothing about her life or what kind of situation she is in... It seems a little weird to make such large assumptions about anyone who you don't personally know!
- hattmall 5y ago
  Because she is extremely easily stressed out
  - colejohnson66 5y ago
    I presume you’ve never been stressed out about anything?
    - hattmall 5y ago
      Well of course I have, but not anything so closely resembling a spam email. If an email, allegedly from a person in Russia, asking about a law in California with regard to your small personal blog creates a measurable level of stress then what happens in an actually stressful event like say having a flat tire on the highway or having a credit card stolen.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  - etataetaet 5y ago
    Key word is "probably"! We just don't have enough information to make any judgments about her. For example from your two comments I could say you are a judgmental individual. However, I think that would be both rude and inaccurate! One article or two comments is just too small of a sample size to get any meaningful insight on someones character!
    - 5y ago
KennyBlanken 5y ago
> If i received such an email, I would mark it as spam and move on with my life. Why did this blogger take it seriously? Because "I'm stupid and fell for a phishing email" doesn't grab eyeballs on Patreon/Twitter like "without my consent" does among the circles they run in. > I also have to question her mental ability to filter noise. Life must be quite stressful for her overall. We're talking about someone who is a furry and writes in multiple personalities on their blog. I love how they brag about how their blog is seen on "the orange site" when most of their submissions are in the single digits.
- walrus01 5y ago
  While I have no stake in the "furry" game, the fact that you seem to think that a person should be disregarded because they're a "furry" is only very slightly above outright calling them a slur.
jahewson 5y ago
But spam exists for a reason - it works! Some percentage of people really do respond to spam emails. It’s not ok to take advantage of those people or dismiss them.
smsm42 5y ago
Gives you a pause when you realize smart people probably wouldn't believe an email saying their SSN was arrested and they need to buy $500 in Amazon gift cards and send to this address to avoid being arrested by the FBI - but they totally believed a random person in Novosibirsk has rights to demand their attention and them performing various time-consuming tasks because some California law says so. I can't say such reputation for California laws is totally unearned (look up prop 65 if you want to know more on how insane it is).
tgv 5y ago
Perhaps, but some people do reply to emails, for whatever reason. But that does not alter the fact that the study was conducted in an unethical manner.
xena 5y ago
I am sorry I am a different person than you and as such have different reactions to this. It looked plausible to me and the geoIP lookup on the mail server said it was in California, AFAIK this is all you need for someone to be a CCPA subject. I do not want to fuck with the legal system.

dannyobrien 5y ago

I was contacted by my system administrator about this email, even though we chat roughly once a year; we get a lot of spam too but a legal threat is something you need to keep an eye on.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> legal threat is something you need to keep an eye on. Yes but you still need to be judicious and critical.
- dqv 5y ago
  The things I would look for in an illegitimate email are not there. Where are the typos? The poor use of language? It is a very well-crafted email. The address is maybe a little off, but tons of my legitimate clients have weird emails like this. It would have gotten my response... probably an hour of my time explaining how our policies work and how, yes, we would comply with their request even if the laws don't technically protect them. There isn't really a prefilled template you can respond to questions like this (if you actually care about responding inquiries like this) so I would have genuinely spent time thinking about the questions and giving them more than a yes and no.

akersten 5y ago

Fully agreed. I'm shocked she gave a random unsolicited emailer the time of day. Most problems are ones we create for ourselves. Responding to spam and then feeling like you've been the victim of some injustice that the spam didn't say "hey, I'm not really spam, I'm grad-student flavored spam" is quite a take. Here's a tip for anyone not running a business: If your response is legally required, it'll come in the physical mail. Don't take legal advice from spam, me, or your sysadmin.

Aerroon 5y ago
But these privacy laws do require a response when you collect data, no?
- akersten 5y ago
  Not until you're collecting data at the scale where you'd have a legal@yourdomain team to forward anything that vaguely smells like a legal inquiry. Which is why my tip applied for "non-business" cases.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Is it reasonable to expect people to know that? If I'm below that level, what are the odds of me knowing the law well enough to know that it doesn't apply to me?
    - Godel_unicode 5y ago
      > Is it reasonable to expect people to know that? Yes. It's not hard.
      - seebs 5y ago
        Do you think this applies in general to questions of legal liability, or is this one unique? If it's unique, why should anyone think that this case is unique? If you think in general it's "not hard" to know things about legal liability, either you're Elle Woods or you're an extremely overconfident fool.
hattmall 5y ago
Certified mail or trash, there's no way to even know if an email was really delivered to a recipient anyway. I'm aware of read receipts but they aren't reliable.
- iudqnolq 5y ago

ZhangSWEFAANG 5y ago

This is unlike traditional spam in the sense that it feels more legitimate.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
I think that’s relative to your experience. To me it is spam and I would not even finish reading it, let alone grace it with a reply.
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  What is your experience?
- cgriswald 5y ago
  Isn’t that kind of the point? Your experience isn’t the relevant experience. Treating this email as spam is the obvious thing to do to you, but it is demonstrably not the case for others, the author included. Others don’t have access to your experiences.
walrus01 5y ago
In the modern scam era we live in, it somehow seems more legit because it mentions something in a specific article of legal code, and isn't demanding payment of your IRS taxes in iTunes gift cards.
the_af 5y ago
The start with some Russian woman saying "hello, I'm Masha from..." triggers all sort of mental spam filters. Adding random legal codes from who knows where reminds me of "according to the CANSPAM law 134/38 this cannot be considered spam" that every spam mail used to have. Seriously, just a few lines in this mail raises all sorts of flags.

walrus01 5y ago

I see emails from cranks all the time and similarly have a do-not-respond policy to any of them, but at the same time, something like this is very slightly worrisome because it seems to be presenting the non-zero chance that some random person will sue you in your local court system. Which even if it is completely nonsensical and has no basis in law, could cost thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response to a statement of claim. If you have ever seen the experiences of people who have been sued by sovereign citizens/freeman-on-the-land/"this is an admiralty flag" people, it would help to better understand the context I'm viewing it in.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> very slightly worrisome Recommend you don’t spend “ thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer and file a response” on something that you find very slightly worrisome. Again, I think you, too, are being suckered into spam. Plenty of people fall for spam scams. It is nothing to be ashamed of. Think of all the people who fall for the fake IRS phone calls. But learn from it: keep your guard up when you get emails, phone calls, or text messages from strangers. Anything legally binding in the US will come to you via snail mail.
- walrus01 5y ago
  > Anything legally binding in the US will come to you via snail mail. yes it will, but a really determined person with an axe to grind will very often make known their intentions well in advance of that. and no, it won't always come by snail mail, DMCA notices and similar with actual legal threats will arrive regularly via SMTP.
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    This is, of course, not true. Please stop.
    - walrus01 5y ago
      My job involves DMCA pass through compliance and I have several hundred of such threats from a myriad of sources sitting in an inbox right now which say otherwise. Perhaps you've never had thousands of people torrenting movies using you as a service provider before.

Zababa 5y ago

You omit the following line: > I have a few questions about your process for responding to California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) data access requests This is the worrying part.

userbinator 5y ago
A Russian with questions about California... If the first sentence didn't already raise your suspicion, the second one definitely should, and put it over the threshold for spam/scam.
- dqv 5y ago
  Customers say weird shit in correspondence all the time and you have to fill in a lot of blanks. This would have easily imprinted “oh she lived in California at one point and wants to know if we’ll still comply with her requests” in customer service mode.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    The "is this even a customer" filter should catch that.
    - dqv 5y ago
      We're operating in reality where the answer to "is this even a customer" is often "unsure - to be determined", not an imagined scenario where software with 100% accuracy tells us when someone isn't.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

etataetaet 5y ago

I'm sorry but how can you make the assumption that "life must be quite stressful for her overall."? We know almost nothing about her life or what kind of situation she is in... It seems a little weird to make such large assumptions about anyone who you don't personally know!

hattmall 5y ago
Because she is extremely easily stressed out
- colejohnson66 5y ago
  I presume you’ve never been stressed out about anything?
  - hattmall 5y ago
    Well of course I have, but not anything so closely resembling a spam email. If an email, allegedly from a person in Russia, asking about a law in California with regard to your small personal blog creates a measurable level of stress then what happens in an actually stressful event like say having a flat tire on the highway or having a credit card stolen.
TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
- etataetaet 5y ago
  Key word is "probably"! We just don't have enough information to make any judgments about her. For example from your two comments I could say you are a judgmental individual. However, I think that would be both rude and inaccurate! One article or two comments is just too small of a sample size to get any meaningful insight on someones character!
  - 5y ago

KennyBlanken 5y ago

> If i received such an email, I would mark it as spam and move on with my life. Why did this blogger take it seriously? Because "I'm stupid and fell for a phishing email" doesn't grab eyeballs on Patreon/Twitter like "without my consent" does among the circles they run in. > I also have to question her mental ability to filter noise. Life must be quite stressful for her overall. We're talking about someone who is a furry and writes in multiple personalities on their blog. I love how they brag about how their blog is seen on "the orange site" when most of their submissions are in the single digits.

walrus01 5y ago
While I have no stake in the "furry" game, the fact that you seem to think that a person should be disregarded because they're a "furry" is only very slightly above outright calling them a slur.

jahewson 5y ago

But spam exists for a reason - it works! Some percentage of people really do respond to spam emails. It’s not ok to take advantage of those people or dismiss them.

smsm42 5y ago

Gives you a pause when you realize smart people probably wouldn't believe an email saying their SSN was arrested and they need to buy $500 in Amazon gift cards and send to this address to avoid being arrested by the FBI - but they totally believed a random person in Novosibirsk has rights to demand their attention and them performing various time-consuming tasks because some California law says so. I can't say such reputation for California laws is totally unearned (look up prop 65 if you want to know more on how insane it is).

tgv 5y ago

Perhaps, but some people do reply to emails, for whatever reason. But that does not alter the fact that the study was conducted in an unethical manner.

xena 5y ago

I am sorry I am a different person than you and as such have different reactions to this. It looked plausible to me and the geoIP lookup on the mail server said it was in California, AFAIK this is all you need for someone to be a CCPA subject. I do not want to fuck with the legal system.