<story><title>The IAB loves tracking users but hates users tracking them</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/01/the-iab-loves-tracking-users-but-it-hates-users-tracking-them/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dale_glass</author><text>&amp;gt; As part of the UID2 API they specifically describe how an advertiser must &amp;quot;normalise&amp;quot; their users&amp;#x27; email addresses.
&amp;gt;
&amp;gt; This means h.a.n.solo+iab@gmail.com becomes plain old hansolo@gmail.com&lt;p&gt;It seemed to be completely obvious to me even decades back, that the + scheme would be trivially parsed and reversed.&lt;p&gt;So I don&amp;#x27;t use it and just keep on making completely new aliases. So amazon gets amazon@example.com. If I&amp;#x27;m not going to pay for anything on this account it also gets a random name from a random piece of well known media, like &amp;quot;Donald Duck&amp;quot;, and all the data filled in randomly to ensure that it&amp;#x27;s not googleable, and doesn&amp;#x27;t correlate with any accounts anywhere else.&lt;p&gt;The bigger issue I see is the desire to link everything to a phone number. Even stuff made for privacy, like Signal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>alasdair_</author><text>Even if I need to use my real address, I’ll use the “address 2” field to say something like “Amazon sold my information”&lt;p&gt;I’ve had quite a lot of third party junk mail with this kind of stuff on it over the years.</text></comment>
<story><title>The IAB loves tracking users but hates users tracking them</title><url>https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/01/the-iab-loves-tracking-users-but-it-hates-users-tracking-them/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>dale_glass</author><text>&amp;gt; As part of the UID2 API they specifically describe how an advertiser must &amp;quot;normalise&amp;quot; their users&amp;#x27; email addresses.
&amp;gt;
&amp;gt; This means h.a.n.solo+iab@gmail.com becomes plain old hansolo@gmail.com&lt;p&gt;It seemed to be completely obvious to me even decades back, that the + scheme would be trivially parsed and reversed.&lt;p&gt;So I don&amp;#x27;t use it and just keep on making completely new aliases. So amazon gets amazon@example.com. If I&amp;#x27;m not going to pay for anything on this account it also gets a random name from a random piece of well known media, like &amp;quot;Donald Duck&amp;quot;, and all the data filled in randomly to ensure that it&amp;#x27;s not googleable, and doesn&amp;#x27;t correlate with any accounts anywhere else.&lt;p&gt;The bigger issue I see is the desire to link everything to a phone number. Even stuff made for privacy, like Signal.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>superkuh</author><text>&amp;gt;The bigger issue I see is the desire to link everything to a phone number.&lt;p&gt;Yep, I&amp;#x27;ve had my youtube account since before Google bought youtube in 2006. Just this week I noticed that I am no longer able to put URLs in the descriptions of videos I upload to youtube. I have to &amp;quot;verify&amp;quot; by giving them my phone number before any clickable URLs are allowed in descriptions. But apparently all URLs are clickable URLs. Additionally, even videos I uploaded in 2008, if I go to edit their descriptions now and I originally included a URL, I cannot submit it.&lt;p&gt;Phone number &amp;quot;verification&amp;quot; is nasty. I suppose this is the end of my almost 2 decades of using youtube to host videos.&lt;p&gt;As for email spam prevention, I&amp;#x27;ve run my own mailserver with a domain since 2011. I give each service an &lt;i&gt;actual&lt;/i&gt; unique email address and then just catch-all emails sent to my domain. It works great.</text></comment>