OrangeBlossomBaby |
06-04-2021 03:06 PM |
Quote:
Originally Posted by GrumpyOldMan
(Post 1954297)
Well, a couple of points. You are being tracked. PERIOD. I guarantee if you purchase something (almost anything) online you will start seeing ads on websites advertising those items. There are NO settings that will prevent that.
Where you get emails from is more complex, and you can certainly set settings to cut down on letting your email address out, but there are places online that in order to do business (like our vet office, bank, Facebook, Twitter, etc) that require you to give them your email address. Those businesses can/do sell your email address. Many give you the option to not sell or distribute it, but not all.
And even if the site you are doing business with promises to not distribute your email address - sites are hacked daily - every single day, and sometimes very large numbers of accounts are compromised. That results in YOUR email address being circulated on the "dark web" and being sold to people, who then validate that your address is valid and active and in turn then sell it at a premium to advertising companies.
And I see you qualified your statement with "local" businesses. A lot of so-called "local" businesses are not local. And second, companies advertise on the internet. Almost NONE of them do it themselves. They simply provide ad content to an advertising company and pay some amount per "hit". A hit being someone responds, either by clicking an email, or visiting a targeted IP address, or many other ways.
I expect your email service provider is doing some amount of spam blocking for you.
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I have 8 different e-mail addresses and use each one for different things. If I need to supply an e-mail address to a company that I know will end up giving me ridiculous spam, I give them a specific e-mail address. They can spam it all they want. Once a month I open the account, hit "select all" and "delete." I never read any of the e-mails on that account, and never use that account to send anyone anything, because that's my spam account. Another one is for professional services only. My doctor, my dentist, my lawyer, the pesticide guy, the e-mail of the guy who works for the company that did our windows. The company that did our windows? THEY get a third e-mail address. That's for "companies that I rarely ever do business with but want to keep their info handy just in case."
Another one is for personal friends and family. And so on and so forth.
I have a spam-blocker, an ad blocker, I run ccleaner and malwarebytes on my desktop every so often, and I have a little .exe file on my hard drive that I keep just in case none of my security measures worked and someone sent me a particularly nasty trojan that sometimes slips through random peoples' computers. That file will meet the trojan and basically smack it upside the head.
I also use FBP, aka "Fluff Busting Purity," an extension for Facebook that prevents ads and lets you filter out (or in) and sort and configure just about anything Facebook can do, and several things it can't do, but you'd want it to do.
The only ads I ever see, are ads I intentionally try to see. They don't appear on my computer at all, otherwise. I get ads on a few apps on my phone (Waze has in-app ads) but they're unobtrusive and easily ignored.
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