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Q: In my email folders (Gmail) I have noticed that I get emails from companies that I did not sign up for to receive their advertisements or whatever they want me to know about. How did that happen? Is someone that I did sign up with selling my info? If so, how do I stop that?

– Spouse Peripheral
Bluewater Bay, Florida

Most sites that offer to sign you up for advertising, or “product offers” as they are often called, will present you with a lengthy set of “Terms of Service” or a “Privacy Policy” that you must agree to in order to proceed.  Almost nobody ever reads these, and so have no idea what they’re agreeing to.  Often times, buried in that fine print, is a clause that states that you grant permission for them to share your contact information with “trusted third-party partners” or “marketing affiliates” which are legalese terms for “anyone willing to pay us.”  When you check that little box, you are agreeing to have your information shared with any other marketer, regardless of their business type.  Clever, and good for them, but not so much for us consumers.

Another possibility is that your personal data was obtained by scraping, which is a digital process in which an automated computer program is used to extract data from a website.  This can include popular sites where people hang out, like Facebook, Instragram, SnapChat, TikTok, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and more.  People on these sites generally want to be seen, so they are great places for your address to be compromised. This is the primary reason why, in the 20 years I’ve been publishing It’s Geek To Me, I’ve never published anyone’s full name or email address in the column.  I know better, and I’m looking out for you.

It’s also possible that your data was simply stolen in one of the many data breaches that are in the news almost weekly.  Hackers have managed to break into some absolutely huge sites, and have stolen personal records numbering in the tens of billions.  Once a hacker has your information, it gets spread around, often sold on the dark web. The scary part of this is that often these data breaches go far beyond names and email addresses.  They can include personal financial information like credit card numbers, bank accounts and more. With the proliferation of these breaches, it’s getting more and more difficult to pinpoint the source from whence your data was compromised.  If you don’t know what company was at fault, it can limit your options when it comes time to seek relief.

Even if none of these apply in your case, you might fall victim to a simple dictionary attack.  Spammers use automated software to generate millions of random email combinations (for example, Geek123@gmail.com) then send messages to each to see which ones don’t bounce back. 

What can you do?  Well, for emails from legitimate companies, you can unsubscribe, but you should do so using Gmail’s “Unsubscribe” link, rather than a link in the email.  That rule changes for true SPAM, or for anything that just appears suspicious.  For these, you should never click any Unsubscribe button or link.  First of all, the odds of actually being unsubscribed from spammy content are near-zero, and second, your response back to the spammer serves only to verify that your email address is active and monitored.  That knowledge increases its value exponentially.  In these cases, use Gmail’s “Report Spam” or “Report Phishing” buttons instead.  This trains Google’s automated filters to block similar emails from reaching your inbox in the future.

Gmail has introduced what this Geek happens to think is a superb little trick for combatting instances of your email address being shared.  It serves more to help you identify the source of the sharing than to actually stop it, but as they say, knowing is half the battle.  You can create instant aliases by adding a plus sign, then some descriptive words after your existing username.  For example, if your email address is “username@gmail.com” you could use “username+storename@gmail.com” when signing up for a service.  Any emails sent to that address will appear in the same inbox you’ve always used.  The trick is that if you start to get spam or other unexpected offers sent to the alias, you will know exactly which company sold your information.  This also gives you the basis to fight back, since you can easily create a Gmail filter that routes any incoming email to the alias directly into the trash.  Ha!  Take that, spammers!

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