Protecting Your Privacy

So, how many people here receive unsolicited junk e-mail? One or more msgs a month? One or more msgs a week? One or msgs a day?! While the topic of “Protecting Your Privacy” can be broad — password protection, file encryption, etc. —, the scope of this presentation is protecting your e-mail address from unsolicited junk e-mail — which is certainly a form of invasion of privacy — on the World Wide Web, in newsgroups, on America Online, and in personal e-mail.

Most of you are pretty familiar w/ search engines like Yahoo, Alta Vista, InfoSeek, etc., programs, “robots,” written to go out and, unsupervised, get information to be brought back and processed. Well, modified versions of these search engines do the same thing to get e-mail addresses. With just a little bit of information and forethought, you can protect your privacy and personal e-mail address from these search engines.

On the World Wide Web, as more and more of you put up your pages and sites, you have two defenses. One is to use meta tags to ward off robots. For example:

<META NAME="distribution" CONTENT="local">
<!--Defines that the page is not an index page (is local).-->

<META NAME="robots" CONTENT="none">
<!--Defines which pages should be indexed. NOFOLLOW will index the present page only,
NOINDEX will index linked pages only, ALL will index both the present and the linked pages,
and NONE won't index anything at all.-->

_ The other is to use a robots.txt exclusion file at the root of your site, a very simple text file w/, for example:

# The following specifies that no robots should visit any URL starting with "/qmug.org/LA/"

User-agent: *
Disallow: /qmug.org/LA/

_ in its body, saved as “robots.txt” and placed at the root of your site. Your file should of course list your site. If you don’t have control over your root because your pages are on someone else’s site, aol.com, geocities.com, etc., you can ask them if they can do this for you, but then again, robots might avoid AOL and GeoCities anyway <hehehe>. So...

* Use meta tags.

* Use a robots.txt file.

In newsgroups, two more options. If you read newsgroups, you may notice that many people use modified “from,” “reply-to,” or return e-mail addresses, like “QMUGLA@aol..REMOVEME..com,” or “QMUGLA@aol..NOSPAM..com.”

_ Another cool option is the advent of free e-mail accounts from usa.net, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc. These companies offer you the option of having e-mail that is sent to them for you forwarded on to your personal e-mail account. That way, if you’re uncomfortable about giving out your personal e-mail address in newsgroups, to résumé database services, in personal ads, or whatever, open up a free e-mail account somewhere! So...

* Use REMOVEME or NOSPAM in your e-mail address.

* Use usa.net, hotmail.com, yahoo.com, etc.

On America Online, the first account you open is your “master” account, and from there you can create up to four more accounts, which you may delete at will to create other, “disposable” accounts. Each of these accounts can have profiles, which is a way for you to offer information about yourself to other people on AOL w/o you having to be online to give it to them directly. And w/ each of these accounts you can participate in chat rooms, and all of this is really cool and neat.

_ BUT, both of these open you up to receive unsolicited e-mail. In preparing for QMUG/LA’s *4th* Anniversary, we were able to find over 115 lesbian, gay and bisexual Macintosh/Mac users in Los Angeles and Hollywood (CA, not FL). And of course, simply capturing the Who’s Chatting window contents to a text file captures hundreds of e-mail addresses as well. So...

* Don’t create a profile for your master account.

* Don’t go into chat rooms w/ your master account

And lastly, in personal e-mail, again, two situations. One, junk e-mail is a business. Once you’re on a list, that list will probably be sold to some other junk e-mail company. If you receive a piece of unsolicited junk e-mail that offers you the option of removing yourself from their distribution list, *don’t* respond! That only verifies to the junk e-mail company that they have a valid e-mail address.

_ And two, chain mail is a form of junk e-mail. If you have friends who like to send you such stuff, take a look next time at how many e-mail addresses of people you don’t know are attached to it, and think if you really want to add *your* e-mail address to this list... If you’re superstitious and are deathly afraid of breaking this chain, then forward it on via blink carbon copy (BCC). That way, you’ve not broken the chain, you’ve added *your* e-mail address to this long list of people just waiting for junk e-mail, BUT you have not subjected your friends to this list — you let *them* decide if they want to participate. So...

* Don’t respond to junk e-mail.

* Use BCC (blind carbon copy).

And w/ that, we hope that these eight tips and tricks will help you in protecting your privacy! (And that of your friends!) For more information, you may also want to check out the Email Abuse FAQ as well as the Spam FAQ.