Issue #20 - Wednesday, August 22, 2018
http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2018/08/20-all-your-emails-are-being-stolen-and.html
http://dennyhatch.blogspot.com/2018/08/20-all-your-emails-are-being-stolen-and.html
Posted by Denny Hatch
All your emails are being stolen
and sold all over the world.
All your emails are being stolen
and sold all over the world.
At 10:47 AM on May 16th, long-time
reader Stan and I had an email exchange about my use of a Walking-Stick Chair
to relieve my lower back pain.
Stan suggested I use a nationwide consortium
of physical therapists. At precisely 11:00 a.m. I replied via my Yahoo
mail:
Aaah, Stan…
Thank you.
I’d rather spend my money and time on Grey Goose
vodka and Viking cruises.
Yahoo read my email message and sent it off to Grey Goose.
Grey Goose sent me the following email 15 minutes later.
How did I feel?
1. Violated.
2. Very angry at Yahoo for stealing the private contents of a customer's email and selling it to an advertiser for cash.
3. Very, very offended that upmarket ($39 a bottle) Bacardi/Grey Goose vodka had entered into a conspiracy with Yahoo to invade a Grey Goose customer's privacy for profit.
In Issue#2
of this cranky blog I uncovered Verizon/OATH:—a global conspiracy of
451 private corporations that have banded together in a massive hacking, invasion of privacy, and
theft ring.
Among them:
AOL – Amazon – Adobe –
CNN – Facebook – Google - LinkedIn - Match.com – NBC – Pinterest – Spotify -
TripAdvisor - Twitter - Verizon - Washington Post – Yahoo! and 435 others!
These venal bastards steal your e-mails, history of searches and downloads, purchases, trysts, travels,
travails and browsing habits—every scintilla of data by and about you, your
family, your children, friends, business associates, profession, enemies, even your pets—and sell 'em.
Note OATH's credo below:
"Our stories and services connect with 1 billion people
around the world every day."
Clearly this is the largest international criminal conspiracy in history.
Note OATH's credo below:
"Our stories and services connect with 1 billion people
around the world every day."
Clearly this is the largest international criminal conspiracy in history.
The ever-expanding Verizon-Oath dossier devoted to you contains over 1,000 pages of your most private and professional data in myriad “clouds” and available to anybody on the planet with cash.
WANTED: A Snoop-proof,
Spam-proof, Hack-proof Email Service
Eight years ago I proposed that the
money-losing U.S. Postal Service could become profitable by creating a
private, paid e-mail system worldwide.
If the USPS—with its
275-year reputation for honesty and reliability—announced a paid website for
private correspondence, I would sign up in a nanosecond.
If not the USPS, then
a private company to create a communications network for business and consumers:
• Dues: $5.95 a year.
• Cost to send the
same email to an unlimited number of recipients within the system: 1¢.
• Use the E-ZPASS collection system.
• Use the E-ZPASS collection system.
• Cost to receive
e-mail within the system: Bupkis. Free.
• Wanna correspond
with a member? Join.
• No ads.
• No spam. (Spammers
cannot afford the cost.)
• No leaks.
• No hacks.
• Don’t like paying 1¢
per email?
—Use free
Yahoo! AOL, Gmail, etc.
—Allow
your entire life to continue being available to the world.
—And go
on losing 117 hours a year dealing with spam.
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Word Count: 471
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHi Denny. All good points. But you think that's bad? Check out this article at Wired Magazine about the Russian cyberattack a year ago June that caused about $10 billion damage throughout the world. Utterly terrifying. I'm slowly adopting the cranky opinion that the internet is a bane. As nice as it would be to have more private email -- and as fond as I am of the USPS -- I doubt that if they set up an email system it would fare any better than anyone else's when it comes to hack attacks.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.wired.com/story/notpetya-cyberattack-ukraine-russia-code-crashed-the-world/
By the way, there ARE far more secure email systems available out there than the free Yahoo and Gmail systems. Google something like "Truly secure email" and you'll get plenty of hits on it. E.g., Citrix is a pretty respected provider of such, one my former company used to good effect. There are many others.
Thank you for your long and thoughtful comment.
DeleteI pay dearly to send postal mail. I am guaranteed privacy.
Imagine the hell to pay if the USPS offered to sell the contents of all the mail they handle.
All the online “services” operate on a cockamamie business model of being free to the user and making their money via snooping, stealing and selling the information.
Why not let online USERS PAY for guaranteed hack-proof, theft-proof, ad-proof correspondence?
I looked at your Citrix website. The copy is cold gibberish. I had to go to Google to find how much it costs. Here's the poop:
“All Citrix Cloud services subscriptions are sold on a per-user, per-year subscription basis. Featured plans are shown below.”
Citrix Workspace, $27.20; Virtual Apps & Desktops (formerly XenApp & XenDeskto), $16.32; Endpoint Management (formerly XenMobile), $4.08; Content Collaborations (ShareFile integration), $15.28, Secure Browser, $3.26.
What the hell are these people selling? They are talking to themselves!
Fidelity’s Peter Lynch said: “Never invest in an idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.”
What happened to the K.I.S.S. concept?
Thanks again for writing.
I use Duck Duck Go Go as a search engine, and that seems to eliminate ads popping up.
ReplyDeletePlus, ProtonMail seems secure.
But what do I know!
Garry, thanks for taking the time to comment. I looked at both DuckDuckgo and ProtonMail. Dunno how they make their money. I want to pay somebody to guarantee privacy and not flood me with ads and spam—à la Yahoo. Am I nuts?
DeleteThanks for your insight. Deleting cookies every so often couldn't hurt. These snoop sites get information from all sources. I would gladly pay small fees to avoid them. It would serve them right. The USPS still gets a host of my business. Nice people there for the most part.
DeleteJeffrey,
DeleteGreat hearing from you. In 1912 in another life I proposed a hack-proof, ad-free, spam-free 1¢-per-email system. It was the era when the mantra was: All information should be free!” Here’s a typical response from the time.
Again, thanks for commenting. Do keep in touch.
Bill M. • Once again, I have to question your sanity, Denny. Or, maybe, you're just pulling our legs again. I no longer can tell if you're joking, being serious, or if you're suffering from dementia. Nobody with any wisdom would suggest that we: 1. Allow a government entity to be in charge of (and the conduit for) our email correspondence; 2. Start paying for email services. 3. Expect spammers to obey the new government run email service, and give up their spamming (using other FREE! email services) to reach our in-boxes. Anyone with a modicum of understanding regarding how government works knows that if such a program were initiated now, at the low, low price of just 1 cent per email, that it wouldn't be long before that rises to 5 cents. Then 10 cents. Then 25 cents. The sky's the limit. Once we agree to pay for what's now free, there's no ceiling to what we could be charged. And, if all the other free services disappear, we'd be at the mercy of pay-to-play email services. And then we'd be screwed. Spam is a fact of life in today's day and age. Instead of setting us on a path that could lead to the end of free email, I strongly encourage you to man-up and just deal with it.
Hey Denny,
ReplyDeleteI don't think it's really much different than the bygone days of Mail Order before the internet. Easier? More information? Absolutely.
But Data Brokers are where we got our lists long before the internet. They sold it then without our expressed permisssion and are selling it now. Both of us have used one of those list and jammed up the PO box of someone who never consented to the mailings you and I created and sent out. They filled out a survey or ordered a free magazine without reading the terms and conditions and the data broker got em and sold it to us:)
Order from a Mail order company in 1986 and suddenly your mailbox was full of catalogs and unsolicted offers. Buried in the fine print was that they had the right to sell your information and it took a lawyer to figure out how to opt out.
I am sure in your yahoo.com email account (one of the worst what the heck are you thinking lol) terms and conditions all of this is clearly spelled out for you...if you can find it.
I think the only thing that has changed is the amount of information avaialble and the ease of which to harvest it. They give us free services, but we pay a price with our privacy.
Keep on writing! I look forward to your emails!
Brian