Does The Mint Sell Our Info?

Oh lord your going to starve! One a day are vitamins......not jokes.....how are you at sign spinning?

 

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Now he's going to charge you a cover charge...you laughed pay up.

 

There is actually a lot of control over data collection and targeted ads available in browser and site settings. You can fight back with best practices such as clearing cookies, using private browsing, using a VPN, using an ad-blocker, and logging out of sites when you're not actually using them.

 

Correct. I got VPN several months ago and it stopped.

 

What is VPN?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_private_network

 

Many companies swear that they'll NEVER sell your name or personal information. You believe that even more when that promise comes from a charity. My family made a donation for a number of years to a charity that said they never sell names or personal info. Just to keep them honest we changed the spelling of my wife's first name from Theresa to Tessa when we sent them our donation. That's the first and only time we used the name Tessa so there would be no doubt where any sold name came from. We never received any mail addressed to Tessa until the year that we didn't continue our family donation. Now our mailbox gets mail addressed to Tessa on a routine basis.
So if you want to see who is selling your info just change the spelling of your name or use a nickname and wait for the results to come rolling in. It might take years but it'll happen.

 

For those who don't know or remember, there was the Neilson ratings for the television market. The company sent out logs to be filled out by ordinary people on what shows they were watching and when. The data was then used to place ads on certain shows based on the demographic info collected.

I was excited when I was chosen to fill out a log many many years ago, back in the day of tube televisions.

 

A little off the wall, but... have you been buying anything from eBay? I know some of the big dealers have pseudonymous accounts there. There have been one or two cases where I bought or sold something bullion-related, and started getting spam to my eBay or PayPal address from a dealer.

 

As far as big companies and leaks:

Many years ago, I started getting spam to my Ameritrade email address. We have our own domain name (<lastname>.<something>), and I can set up as many email aliases as I want, so I had set up a "blah-ameritrade" alias and used that when I opened my account. Nobody else EVER saw that address; I only used it for Ameritrade.

I contacted Ameritrade about it. They denied that it could possibly have been their leak, and made the usual condescending suggestions about keeping my email safe. So, I changed my Ameritrade email to "blah-ameritrade-<date>". Spam kept coming in on the old address, but my Ameritrade email came in on the new one.

One month later, I started getting spam on the new address. (Not on any of my dozens of other email aliases, just the Ameritrade one.)

I called and raised hell, threatened to take my business elsewhere, told them there was nowhere else it could have leaked from. They still denied that it could have been them, but offered me some free trades to stay on.

A bit more than a year later, the story hit the news. Nope, it wasn't just me. The company pinky-swore that it was only email addresses that had leaked (not "were leaking", mind you), and not phone numbers, or SSNs, or, you know, money. I never saw evidence that any of my other personal info had gotten out -- after ten or fifteen years, if it were going to happen, it would've happened by now -- and I never did go to the trouble of jumping ship.

But I did permanently adjust my expectations of how much I can trust "big, established, highly-professional operations".

 

They could be, Randy. User data is a valuable commodity that many site owners can't resist cashing in on.

But even if a site doesn't sell your data, there are still these nasty little things called trackers that collect information about your internet habits, and they seem to be everywhere.

On my MacBook, the latest version of Safari blocks trackers. Here's what it told me a moment ago:



How these things work is far beyond my pay grade, but it wouldn't surprise me if they have the ability to harvest email addresses.

For those not similarly equipped, there's a free app called Ghostery that works the same as my Safari browser at blocking trackers.

I don't know how any of this translates to smart phones. I rarely access web sites on my phone for the same reason I don't watch movies on my phone...too small and aggravating.

 

All's well that ends well... Have a nice day!

 

Watch the movie, "The Social Dilemma," on Netflix. You will get a better understanding of how the internet collects, uses, and sells, our information.
A warning: it is a bit unsettling.

 

I was waiting for my car to be serviced and I was bored. I saw an app to play solitaire, so I played for a while. Now I'm getting ads that are almost impossible to delete.

 

I can't recommend Ghostery enough. Combined with NoScript, an app for blocking cookies, I see virtually no advertisements while I browse the web. I don't even see those annoying youtube ads anymore ever since youtube got in trouble for forcing advertisements during children's videos.

The only downside is sometimes, in order to fully access a website, I need to manually allow the scripts which allow the website to function properly. Lately, some companies have been getting increasingly proficient at tying the website's essential cookies to their advertisements.

As far as email spam- After I started buying stuff on ebay the amount of spam I receive multiplied exponentially. I can only assume it is the result of individual sellers selling my email address.

 

Yeah, I use Ghostery on an older desktop iMac that doesn't run the latest OS. It does an equally good job of shutting down the trackers. Thanks for the tip about NoScript.

Reasonable assumption!

 

Apps mine user data too. I dumped all non-essential apps from my phone because of that.

 

Just as likely they got your email from a grading company, or bullion seller, or any other coin related purchase where you gave an email to someone else.

 

There's some places on ebay that if you buy from once you get put on a mailing list for flyers in the actual mail. I would say ebay purchases are tracked by something. Facebook is the absolute worst offender. I don't use it and never will. I do use Instagram and it seems the phone is listening to conversations. There was an add on instagram that I hadn't seen in quite a while. I mentioned the name to my wife in casual conversation. A few minutes later I opened my instagram account. Saw one news article at the top, scrolled down and the very next thing was an add for the product I just mentioned.
If I buy something from Algaebarn on my computer in the basement, my wife will get an add for algaebarn on her phone on facebook at some point that day.
They're really looking to squeeze every last nickel out of everybody with advertising and it's invasive.

 

You need to watch The Social Dilemma on Netflix.
You'll never view any social media the same again. Eye opening documentary. CEO's and high level execs in Silicone Valley who ban social media from their own kids.