General Music Chat

My wife went online ad made an inquiry for life insurance. Within minutes my email inbox was inundated with dozens of messages for all kinds of products, not just insurance. Maybe it's time to change my email address.

Or you could just pick up the phone next time.[/b]

welcome to the internet!

Your main email account, the one where you conduct important business with trusted contacts, should be insulated by one or more auxiliary email accounts.

When you or your wife go shopping online or conduct business with anyone who does not explicitly promise NOT to share your email address with "targeted advertising partners" aka "spammers" etc. You should do so from an email set up especially for shopping etc. separate from your main email account.

Earthlink email accounts, for example, offer a "main" account with an option of up to 10 "disposable" auxiliary email accounts that can be deleted and replaced when they begin to attract too much spam.

It might be less hassle than having to keep replacing your main account and notifying everyone you do know of your new address.

USE WEBMAIL like any site on the internet.. gmail etc.

Never use OUTLOOK or OUTLOOK EXPRESS, when you do you dl all that spam and attachment directly into your home pc.

Yahoo is ok for webmail. Even hotmail, if you have to.

it's a complex web of marketing invasions on your PC.

If you google something like 'cheap car insurance', google collects this data based on your IP, also collects what sites you visit, like yahoo mail, for instance.

You will notice that any site you visited or googled now has banner ads based on what you sought out. You ever notice the bandmix banner ads on other pages, like your yahoo mail?

Now google knows your yahoo mail login, and makes that information available in data warehousing / libraries. Data is cheap and 'packaged' based on hundreds of variables,

So.. when an insurance agency buys a customized list from googe, your name, your email, any and all other background info google (or one of 1000 other data warehousers that skim off every website you visit) has on you, is now in the hands of that agency- who will solicit you, and in turn sell your info back to insurance industry data warehouses. It seems way to complex to keep track of, but data warehousing is slick, easy, and efficient. Every new bit of data ultimately ends up on a record and then is quickly updated to redundant servers and services.

The "private browsing" features stop cookies from tracking you, but that's pretty much SO 1999.. tracking by IP has become easier and impossible to block unless you subscribe to an IP blocking service, which isn't inexpensive, but they say a lot of the torrent users subscribe to them because many torrents now have "homing beacons" on them, tracking them back to your IP, and ultimately back to you.

Yeah, it sucks. Very much big brother'ish, and should be illegal, but it's not. In fact, it's celebrated because law enforcement can access the same data, no warrant needed.

Kramerguy, you think everyone has one Static IP address?

That doesn't quite track.