Speaking of Big Brother
In a previous post, I mentioned how everything on the web is tracked. Here’s a creepy real life instance that shows how companies and organizations track you.
Recently, I searched for a concrete contractor. I had a quote a few months ago but the contractor ghosted me after I called the MAGAmoron a MAGAt (MAGA traitor.) This is my not so subtle way of weeding out trumpers and MAGAts.
I looked on Craigslist and several other sites to find potential contractors. I never use the contact form on sites like Yelp or Angie or NextDoor because I know the chances are high they’ll scrape my info and resell it. I normally just copy the email address and send it from my Proton Mail account using an alias account. If you’re unfamiliar with alias email accounts, those are phony accounts that forward replies to your real account while cloaking you from the sender. In other words, I may give Washington Post a phony email so I can read one article without being bombarded with spam. Proton generates an alias like wapo.l34cn@simplelog.com. If they send me a flood of spam, I simply delete that email address and none of their spam ever reaches my Inbox. A Proton Mail subscription lets me create an unlimited supply of phony accounts.
What I didn’t consider is that many contractors use Gmail or Yahoo or some other “free” mail service. That meant my email is susceptible to being scanned. A few days later, while searching for an unrelated product on Home Depot’s site, I was suddenly shown ads for Quickrete concrete. I’ve never searched for Quickrete nor concrete nor anything resembling masonry. I can’t prove it but I surmise Google scanned my email to a Google account user and sold that info to a broker who passed it on to HD. Now, these guys work with tens or hundreds of thousands of data points so it’s not as if they’re specifically targeting me but it’s creepy to know someone is watching my online activities and selling it to some entity to use to make a buck off me.
Let’s change it up a bit. Your friend’s 15 year old daughter is preggo and asks you for advice and help. You shoot an email to an MD friend in another state asking about mifepristone for a 15 year old. Unless everyone in the email chain is on a secure account like Proton, the data can be scanned at any point along the way. You just asked about mifepristone. You didn’t request a prescription, you didn’t refer the kid to the doctor, you didn’t even introduce the kid and doctor. In today’s police state, don’t be surprised when po-po shows up at your doorstep demanding to know the kid’s name.
You’re not going to change everyone’s email habits or provider overnight so use free Proton Mail to communicate with like-minded contacts. For example, you might convince the local Democratic Party Club to use a paid Proton Mail account for club comms. Bottom line, security isn’t simple or easy but it’s necessary when you live in a police state.