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When my kids were young, I set them up with two emails addresses: one for emailing friends, the other for emailing businesses. The assumption was this would pro
by yodon 5y ago
When my kids were young, I set them up with two emails addresses: one for emailing friends, the other for emailing businesses. The assumption was this would protect their personal friend emails from spam. The reality was by the time they were older teens almost all the spam they received came in on their personal friend emails and almost none of it came on their commercial-use addresses.
My assessment was businesses were not stupid enough to sell email addresses (they knew they'd be reamed for it if word got out) but just enough of their friends' machines had sketchy browser plugins, malicious android apps, back-doored aimbot cheats, and etc harvesting contact addresses and sending the data back to spammers.
- bombcar 5y agoThis has been my experience also. Companies do pretty well, random forums get scraped and friends hit “upload my contacts” on every scketchy app they Download.
- BeFlatXIII 5y agoFeels like there are parallels to the big corporation vs. small business discussions that pop up every time labor abuse is discussed here.
- xmprt 5y agoCould you give a rough time period for when you set up their accounts and how old the accounts are now? Just trying to get an idea of if this is still happening even now.
- hutzlibu 5y ago"Just trying to get an idea of if this is still happening even now." Do you think the spammers retired? I doubt it, there is only a shift towards trying to get more phone numbers instead of email.
- dvdkon 5y agoI get mere units of spam yearly both on my email and phone, and I don't really keep either secret. The weird thing is that I know someone whose work address gets lots of spam. Both our addresses are publicly available on the Web.
- xmprt 5y agoI figured that our phones would have had better security principles to prevent this from happening now but I guess I was mistaken.
- antifa 5y agoPhone OS software is pretty blantently negligent in this regard.
- aasasd 5y agoPretty much vast majority of apps in Play Store have permissions to see the contacts—they vacuum up the whole address book and sell it to companies doing correlation with data from other services. This only became worse as ‘big data’ was popularized and the value of this personal info dawned on more people.
- aasasd 5y ago> their friends' machines had malicious android apps harvesting contact addresses Basically the majority of apps in the Play Store have permissions to see the contacts, then they vacuum up the whole address book and sell it to companies doing correlation with data from other services—and pretty much compiling giant stores of identifying info and contacts. I guess it's a given that tons of that info also falls into spammers' hands, and since almost no one in the public ever heard of these particular companies, they face zero consequences for what they're doing.
- zzo38computer 5y agoCould you set up a separate app for contacts (and other stuff that you want to isolate) that others cannot see, in order to prevent it?
- aasasd 5y agoI heard that there is indeed an option to do that, with help of some apps. You keep your real contacts list in these apps. Presumably this also means that you have special dialer and sms apps integrated with this contact list app, since otherwise you can't just tap a contact to dial or message, and would have to copy-paste phone numbers around. Dunno what to do about messengers and such, which integrate with the contact system to show their correspondents in e.g. the ‘share’ menu. Not sure if these contacts are available to other apps—but if they are, it seems impossible to hide them. Also there's e.g. a plugin for the (non open-source) Xposed ‘framework’, to feed fake data to apps that want to access the location and other such info. Seems to be able to fake the contacts, too, but afaiu requires a rooted phone: https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua https://github.com/M66B/XPrivacyLua