My Cover's Been Blown.

[Just for fun]

We don't have any of the listing services like Alaxa. I have the voice search turned off on both my phone and my wife's. And for the most part we use Duck Duck Go for web searching, I still use Google once in a while.

It has helped.

 

[RandyWilson]

I purchased a cheap URL and GMail services for it.

Now, anytime I sign up for anything, I use a custom email tied only to that website:

- Sign up for eBay? Use the email: ebay@<myurl.com>

- Sign up for Home Depot? Use the email: HomeDepot@<myurl.com>

Everything gets dumped into the same inbox, but I can see who's selling my email information and chop off that whole email address with a few clicks.

I run my own mail server.... but mine isn't in the bathroom closet; it's in the laundry room. Every login /website that "needs" and email address gets their own individual and unique address. This makes it easy to sort, file, and delete. Or blow away the whole addy if it's purpose has passed.

More than once I've called up a small company to tell them their systems have been hacked. They inevitably deny it. I point out that I am getting spam (usually canadian meds) on an email address that has only been used once and is only stored on their server. Unfortunately they are usually too stupid to understand the implications.

 

[JimDawson]

I just gave up trying to hide....They'll find you.

I have the black helicopters circling overhead right now. But I'm safe, I have my tinfoil hat on.

 

[rabler]

I purchased a cheap URL and GMail services for it.

Now, anytime I sign up for anything, I use a custom email tied only to that website:

Haven't tried it recently, but at one time it was common for email servers to ignore anything after a + in the username field. So you could send email to user+blah@server.com, where blah was anything you wanted to add. I use a standard ISP for my email address, but have it configured to deliver +blah to folder name blah. So I can put in +spam and something automatically goes to the spam folder.

edited to add: +spam still works for me, I sent a test email to +spam myself.

 

[Nogoingback]

"They're coming to take me away. ha, haaa!" by Jerry Samuels.

Naw, they just want to sell you something...

 

[rabler]

I just gave up trying to hide....They'll find you.

I have the black helicopters circling overhead right now. But I'm safe, I have my tinfoil hat on.

Supervised a staff that ran a mail server for group at a University for quite a while. One day in the early 1990's the FBI dropped in with a court order allowing them to monitor all traffic going in and out of our server, and that we were required to continue running the server without any steps to enhance security. One of my employees pointed out that a new $5,000 board in our Cisco hub would allow them to monitor that server without it being obvious (the server sat in room with a glass wall). Said board showed up a day or two later. All they would say was someone was using that server in a hop to do something illegal.

I didn't check to see if they drove black sedans

 

[pgmrdan]

Anyone have a cell phone running the KaiOS operating system. Supposed to be much more secure than iOS and Android or so I hear. I miss the security of my BlackBerry phones. I'd also like a phone with a removable battery. I think they're not removable in most phones so the phone can keep tracking you even when it's turned off.

 

[keeena]

Haven't tried it recently, but at one time it was common for email servers to ignore anything after a + in the username field. So you could send email to user+blah@server.com, where blah was anything you wanted to add. I use a standard ISP for my email address, but have it configured to deliver +blah to folder name blah. So I can put in +spam and something automatically goes to the spam folder.

edited to add: +spam still works for me, I sent a test email to +spam myself.

Another tip for gmail users (maybe others?) - a period anywhere in an email address (not the domain part) will be ignored. e.g. if your email is notmyemail@gmail (dot com), then you will also receive emails addressed as follows:

not.myemail@gmail (dot com)
not.my.email@gmail (dot com)
etc...

I did this a long time ago as a quick/easy way to have unique-ish emails when registering at other sites because you could see the email address version they used.