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Has anyone ever tried to implment the Microsoft privacy policy? Here is one guy who did.

It doesn't matter what the privacy policy says if they don't follow it.

Cookies don't track which sites you go to.

What world are you living in? Did you read...

http://www.eff.org/Privacy/eff_privacy_top_12.html

"However, some companies that manage online banner advertising are, in essence, cookie sharing rings. They can track which pages you load, which ads you click on, etc., and share this information with all of their client Web sites (who may number in the hundreds, even thousands.) Some examples of these cookie sharing rings are DoubleClick, AdCast and LinkExchange. For a demonstration of how they work, see: http://privacy.net/track/"

If you know they don't like it, why do you use it? Why not use one which the owners are happy for people to use, like me@privacy.net?

There are plenty of places you can safely point to. It's fair to assume that mailboxes at example.{com|net|org} are unmonitored. There's also me@privacy.net which bounces email with a polite notice that you don't want email from the sender. Spamcop provides the conspicuous nobody@devnull.spamcop.net, originally provided for users of their newsgroups but open to all and of course you can just use fake tlds like nobody@fake.invalid which will always be rejected before the email even leaves the spammer's servers.

If you do want to recieve email but only, say, once from a company then you'll be looking at SpamGourmet which provides simple, free, fowarding addresses that expire after X hits.

Privacy.net was made for this very purpose. Using the me@privacy.net address on registrations guarantees no human will ever see an email sent to the address. Upon sending an email to the address, they'll receive an autoresponse back saying, among other things, that "The person who provided you with this e-mail address did not perceive value in receiving your e-mail and/or did not want to provide you with their identity."

Privacy.net was made for this very purpose. Using the me@privacy.net address on registrations guarantees no human will ever see an email sent to the address. Upon sending an email to the address, they'll receive an autoresponse back saying, among other things, that "The person who provided you with this e-mail address did not perceive value in receiving your e-mail and/or did not want to provide you with their identity."

I use spam gourmet with much success as well. I also use privacy.net which works pretty well, too.

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want.

Or use me@privacy.net . That address was especially set up for that sort of thing.

The spam message is entirely contained as an /image/ within the html.

Thankfully, my e-mail client is set up to not render any HTML in an e-mail. I have yet to send back any information to a spammer via specially-coded image tags and am proud of it.

HTML-based e-mail is fundamentally insecure and really should be used by no one (except those who simply don't care about privacy). Go here to learn just what a spammer--or anyone who sends you an HTML-based e-mail--can learn about you with just one "click" of your mouse.

Yes, the spammer can learn what browser version you use, what OS you use, and even what city you live in (via the traceroute). An unusually savvy spammer could use this information to install spyware via known exploits in certain browsers and operating systems.

In short, HTML e-mail is damn scary knowing that so many people us it not knowing just how much information they are giving away for free!

Please, don't pull domain names out of a hat. There is an official fake address that you can use:
me@privacy.net
See their website for more info.

A friend of mine runs a domain that happens to be used a lot by people who think they enter a non-existant domain, and it's driving him nuts. Well, there is some amusement value in noticing how many variations people come up with, but still...

You should really use me@privacy.net as an address for this purpose. See http://www.privacy.net/email/.

This service offers stealth addresses:
me@privacy.net
me1@privacy.net
me2@privacy.net
.
.
.
You get the idea.

NYTimes.com doesn't allow you to sign up with the email address me@privacy.net...

I think this would be a good idea but don't know if there's anyone with the resources to undertake the task. If you could make a business out of it, like maybe Enonymous' Privacy Ratings site, then that might work. I'd monitor it if there was such a site. Maybe someone would want to run something like FuckedCompany.Com but concentrate on slippery privacy practices.

I've found that PrivacyDigest and WebVeil do a pretty good job of keeping abreast of the news. Privacy Digest is better because it is more comprehensive, but WebVeil is selective, seeming to focus on privacy for consumers specifically rather than everything that is privacy under the sun. Otherwise, I just pay attention to and filter what the paranoids are saying in alt.privacy or check on the privacy issues section of Yahoo and Wired.

Well hey, this is kinda like the law against telemarketers calling you after tell them exactly to "take me off your list." I read somewhere that if they call again you can sue them. (more info on this pertaining to telemarketing/junk email here. . .interesting read if you havent seen it already)

The hairy line between advertising and harrassment keeps getting tugged from one side to the other by the courts, regardless of the tangled mess of precedent. Meanwhile, we still get spam and probably always will, 'specially with more people checking their email and letting the voice mail be.

-S

http://students.washington.edu/steve0/

Privacy.net has an address that you can use if you have to provide an e-mail address for registering software, or anything of that sort. All you have to do is use me@privacy.net for whatever reason, and it provides a bounce message to anyone who e-mails it.

You can read more about it here.

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Privacy.net has an address that you can use if you have to provide an e-mail address for registering software, or anything of that sort. All you have to do is use me@privacy.net for whatever reason, and it provides a bounce message to anyone who e-mails it.

You can read more about it here.

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I would care to disagree. The protocols in their current manner offer less security from censorship and tracking than other protocols. HTTP is done via plain-text communication channels, what's to stop a government entity from searching through that to find keywords (ever heard of ECHELON?), or a company like DoubleClick to carefully track your IP address across requests. Hell, check out this example of what HTTP tells the world about you. Servers give away information, ever heard of http://www.netcraft.com and how they get their statistics? The internet is hardly anonymous, any person with enough determination or resources could eventually trace back IP addresses or email to the sender. As recent articles on /. have shown (sorry, but not linked here), even creations like Gnutella, specifically designed to be free and anonymous, can be easily traced. While BXXP may not have security in mind as other replacements for outdated protocols have (like Secure Shell), it is unlikely a sinister govenment/coporate/communist conspiracy to make the internet less free.

They don't need to ask for your email address. If you fill out the identity preferences in Netscape and check "Send email address as FTP password" it's easy to get it anyway.

See http://www.privacy.net/analyze/