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From a service provider's point of view [1], a big portion of "users" with disposable email domains have intention to do bad things, e.g., spamming, aggressivel
by wenbin 5y ago
From a service provider's point of view [1], a big portion of "users" with disposable email domains have intention to do bad things, e.g., spamming, aggressively scraping contents... It's not easy to distinguish users-who-want-to-try-out-then-never come-back from users-who-want-to-do-bad-things-to-your-service.
Typically, online service provider may have empathy towards users with whatever emails, including disposable emails for privacy reasons. Then the online service becomes popular, and spams / scraping activities become out of control - Internet is big and there are a lot of bad people / bots. Try different tactics to fight bad users / bots. Eventually, the service provider joins the dark side and bans the use of all disposable emails. It's not ideal. If you are Google or Amazon, maybe you can trivially allocate 20 full time engineers to develop an elegant solution. For small businesses, you just use very limited resources and do whatever to survive.
[1] I run listennotes.com
- teakettle42 5y ago> From a service provider's point of view [1], a big portion of "users" with disposable email domains have intention to do bad things, e.g., spamming From a service user’s point of view, a big portion of “services” that demand their real email address have intention to do bad things, e.g. spamming
- Spivak 5y agoFine, you don't have to provide your real email and can use a forwarding service. I'm gonna need you to verify your non-voip phone number, submit a picture of your government issued ID and a photo of yourself in a specific random pose as a liveliness check, or register a valid credit card in order to activate your account. Services use emails from well-known providers specifically because they're "good enough" signal in terms of spam/bot avoidance. It's not like the need for those signals go away and "real emails" are one of the most privacy preserving because they're pseudoanonymous. The alternative is Real Name policies.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 3np 5y agoI really don't see how "determine unique legal identity" is such a requirement? What are you running, e-voting? If that's really what you need, the relevant jurisdiction is likely to have some adopted e-identity system. If not, go back and question how you can solve your issues with as little PIIs as strictly necessary.
- Spivak 5y agoWe did, it's called non-disposable email. A non-unique pseudoanonymous identity that's somewhat difficult to mint in bulk. If you don't like "accounts of well-known service providers" -- email or login-with-whoever then sources of identity that "everyone" has that are hard to get many of are government ids, phone numbers and credit cards. Like what else is there? For super technical people we could do something like "proof of bitcoin address" where we verify control of a wallet with some minimum long-standing balance. We could make you submit a recording of yourself saying some random phrase and then do some facial recognition to detect duplicates. IP banning hasn't worked since the 90's.
- sahkopoyta 5y agoI don't really get this. Where do you draw the line between disposable and non-disposable email? What prevents anyone from creating <random string>@gmail.com addresses?
- Spivak 5y agoNothing, but if you try to create 1000 of such emails you’ll get banned by Google.
- franga2000 5y agoA normal user wouldn't make anywhere near that many and to a bot developer, "banned by Google" doesn't present even the slightest of challenges. Source: I develop web scrapers for many sites that really don't want to be scraped, including Google/Abc properties.
- Nextgrid 5y agoI find that the problems you mention are primarily a problem when you offer free accounts and monetize via some other (and typically malicious) way such as the usual "growth and engagement". If accounts or services are paid, spamming becomes unprofitable (the ROI of spam would become negative as they'd need to keep paying for new accounts all the time). Scraping? If you're selling content you should be selling content and not mode of consumption, and for misbehaving scrapers your DoS defense strategy (you have one, right?) would also work there - an easy solution is to rate-limit the amount of requests by account to a reasonable level (that a human user won't exceed) and then let them choose whether they want to consume the content manually or through scraping.
- Handytinge 5y agoThere are many legitimate services that offer free trials. Netflix, Spotify, etc. Free trials are a common method to battle the barrier people have in spending money before understanding if a product or service fits their needs.