1303: Profile Info
| Profile Info |
 Title text: It's ok, they'll always let you opt out! Like they did with the YouTube real name profile thing. |
Explanation
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First Name:
John
Last Name:
If-you-see-this-name-in-an-ad-give-the-product-a-one-star-review-Smith
How to deal with companies harvesting your profile for marketing
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You think no company would use that name? Seriously? The point of using name like this is that companies harvesting profiles will not be checking the profiles manually, they would have automatic software doing that, and unlike human, this software would not be able to recognize anything weird on name like this. -- Hkmaly (talk) 10:18, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
+1 informative 108.162.250.8 11:21, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
I think that it generally goes that the automatic name-searcher things (or whatever the hell it is they're called) have some sort of rudimentary filtering system to avoid picking up spam accounts and the like, but I wouldn't know that much. Besides, if these ads are going to be designed by humans (we haven't made ad-designing robots yet, I hope), then there's going to be at least one person in the loop to check this sort of stuff.CrizBN (talk) 12:02, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
- "we haven't made ad-designing robots yet, I hope" -- it's a thing. https://old.reddit.com/r/TargetedShirts 172.69.35.51 08:47, 21 December 2020 (UTC)
- A human would design the advertisement and leave a place for the software to put the elements (name/picture/etc). The software would later present the add putting in account info either at random or of people believed to be connected to the viewer. The human designing the ad would likely run through a number of test cases, but in a large data set may never notice 'poisoned' credentials. HTH. See comment below from Spongebog. JChrisCompton (talk) 16:42, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
To be honest, you technically can opt out of YouTube real names by linking to a Google+ Page, which does not require a legal name. However, the G+ link UI is intentionally designed to make this option difficult to find. 108.162.219.216 13:58, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
Interestingly Enough, there's been a court case about this kind of Thing, Lane v. Facebook Resulted in the Termination of Facebook's "Beacon" program, which was similair. 108.162.237.7 14:43, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
Havesting and using Peoples information -- whether names, emails content, email addresses or viewing habits is entirely automated, and hence very clever software is needed to filter out "commentary names" -- no advertiser are reviewing the actual content used gained from these harvesting processes. Spongebog (talk)
I'm absolutely positive this would work, because I've done it. I entered "Fake Guy" as my name on some website (I can no longer remember which one) and now I regularly get spam e-mail exhortations addressed to Fake. 108.162.221.33 15:36, 13 December 2013 (UTC)
- As far as spam is concerned, owning my own domain (more than one!) is a godsend. It lets me register under different <blah>@mydomain.foo for each outlet I 'need' to register with. Alongside a "Fake Guy" type personal name thing, where relevent, each place's emails is essentially marked for life (and obviously any sold-on/stolen-by database beneficiaries). Which is useful, as it allows auto-filing the more annoying circulars in their own folders, as well as the more urgent ones in places that make it obvious I should read straight away! (I could also set it up to /dev/nul or forward elsewhere.) In a previous incarnation (an account, and domain, I used in my Usenet post headers) I also got a lot of "<randomtext>@domain.foo" 'hits', speculatively trying mail addresses I'd never given forth (mostly for 419 mails). Also easy to deal with. Which is not quite the target of the cartoon, but related. And (unless you're welded to the idea of multiple throwaway Hotmail/etc accounts, instead, for a no-cost version of this) you might find to be an additional layer in your anti-harvesting weaponry. (Note: a semi-throwaway "just for registering the domain" mail address might be initially needed. But still keep an eye on it or alter to something like "[email protected]" so you don't miss the domain-renewal alerts... which could be awkward if there's anything else potentially important coming in via that route.) But FYI, for those that don't already do something similar. Oh, and also if any mails might need replying-to (not usually necessary with registrations, these days, with at most a confirmation URI to be clicked on), check out your webmail (or standalone/portable mail app) to see what "identity management" features it has, so you can easily reply from the 'correct' personalised address. 141.101.98.98 12:46, 16 December 2013 (UTC)
I created an email alias of a 128-bit randomly generated number and changed my PayPal account to use it. I never gave it to anyone but PayPal. Less than a week later, I received a fully "legitimate" DKIM-signed message from an advertiser I had never heard of. PayPal never answered my complaint. 199.27.128.115 15:56, 18 December 2013 (UTC)
