Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Utilization of Information You Supply: When you supply your
email address to a commercial site, a chat room, or another organi
zation, your address becomes part of a listing by that company or
organization. In a chat room, your email address also may be dis
tributed to other users of the chat room. Depending on the group's
privacy policy, that email address might be used for only restricted
communications, or it might be available for the sending of spam.
If you do not know just how a company or organization will use an
email address you supply, you should assume that your informa
tion may be used to generate email—perhaps on a massive scale.
Exchange of Lists: Once one company has obtained your email
address, the company may sell it to someone else, or several compa
nies may exchange lists. Again, these activities should be covered by
privacy policies, and you should check whether your information
will be distributed before you supply information. Even if a policy
indicates that your information will remain private, however, it does
not follow that the same policy will remain in effect in the future.
Although a company currently may intend to guard your privacy,
circumstances may change. For example, if the company encounters
difficult financial times, and an outside firm offers a large payment
to purchase an email list, then the company may feel some pressure
to change the privacy policy and distribute the list of addresses.
Random Spamming: By scanning Web sites, a potential scammer
can identify possible locations that host email accounts. This does
not give information about specific email addresses, only where
they might be based, but the spammer might just make up possible
addresses and send email. If email bounces as being undeliverable,
then the spammer knows the address is invalid. If the email yields
no response, then the spammer does not know whether the address
is valid or not. However, if a user sends back a note—even to indi
cate that she or he wants to be removed from the list—then the
spammer knows the address is valid and may add the address to the
list for future reference. This strategy of spammers suggests that you
should never respond to spam—you may be confirming that a po
tential address is valid, thus inviting a barrage of further messages!
These four strategies suggest that you should be extremely care
ful in giving out your email address: Always check privacy policies
first, and even then act cautiously. Remember that responding to
spam is a certain way to verify you are reading your email, and en
courages further activity.
