Google Spams You
Evil April 14th, 2007 - By Haochi
Sandy Kemsley says that she has proof that Google sells users’ mailing addresses:
There is only one place where my name is associated with the mailing address of my wine club, and that’s on Google AdSense. When I received this piece of postal spam at that address, I knew that the company that “does no evil” had sold my name and address to the the scumbags who sent it.
Not talking about the physical spams, selling members’ personal information? That’s EVIL!
[photo by Philipp Lenssen, from SpamGoogle]
April 14th, 2007 at 8:18 pm
A friend told me he has registered a Gmail Account and gave it to no one. 4 Month later the account was full of spam.
April 14th, 2007 at 9:24 pm
I agree
I created a domain & added in “Google apps for your domain(GAFYD)” & started receiving spam before even I made a website & gave the mail address to anyone.
In second instance where i moved my the mail service of my own domain from my crapy mail server to google, I got moved from zero spam to good count of spam per day.
Although 99.9% of these spams reach the spam folder, but why spam at the first place???
Do-No-Evil Google, please do no evil :)
April 15th, 2007 at 12:10 am
Google sends you spam you will never see. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
April 15th, 2007 at 12:36 am
What is the agreement with Google AdSense? Does this person know for sure that she didn’t accidentally check a box that allowed sharing? How do we know that she’s being honest?
I hate to say this, but one person of ALL the internet making this one claim doesn’t convince me. That’s like believing that Charlie Sheen is right about 9/11.
More proof is needed before I’ll be swayed. As for spam in email, spammers use apps that guess at email names. Again, that doesn’t convince me either.
I will however freely admit that lately my spam has increased, however I’ve also been posting comments all over the web as well, just like here. How do I know for sure this site won’t share my email address? I’m not saying that they will, my point is that just because we get spam doesn’t mean it’s actually Google or isn’t Google. I just need more proof and someone’s postulation is not enough.
April 15th, 2007 at 3:46 am
There are plenty of bots, that are guessing your mail. For example if they got mymail@yahoo.com confirmed, they’ll send e-mail also to mymail@gmail.com , mymail@hotmail.com … etc :)
The spammers are smarter than you think ;)
April 15th, 2007 at 4:33 am
Jinzo, you’re right. But months ago I created a gmail address, really impossible to guess what it is. And a week, spams were coming. And I don’t use the address for the moment..
April 15th, 2007 at 10:37 am
MagnoliaSouth, thanks so much for casting doubt on my honesty :)
When you sign up for Google AdSense, there are only two contact preferences that are offered, and both are email-based: one to receive service announcements from Google (which I allowed) and one to to receive their newsletter (which I did not allow). At no point was I offered any option to allow/disallow sharing of my postal address, and I assumed that my address privacy was a given.
It’s likely that many other people have had this happen but have not recognized that it came from Google’s address database; in my case, this is the *only* time that I’ve used my name together with my wine club’s PO box address (since the AdSense account is for the club), so it’s pretty easy to pinpoint where it came from. If this piece of mail had arrived at my regular business address along with all the other junk mail, I wouldn’t have had a second thought about it.
April 15th, 2007 at 6:47 pm
1) Compromised information does not necessitate a sale.
2) There isn’t solid proof the information was compromised; there are plenty of ways to associate data collected from disparate sources.
3) Charlie Sheen is right, you fools.
April 16th, 2007 at 7:06 am
wy would spammers send “postal spam” - postal spam costs like $35 per letter.
I think this is compromised information,maybe even taken from a yellow pages etc..
April 16th, 2007 at 5:58 pm
I don’t trust this person. I have google for a couple years and never get junk except the kind that you can’t avoid. There was that one exploit a little while ago where if you were logged in to your gmail account and visited a site it could read your contact list also what about viruses in your computer?
April 20th, 2007 at 11:04 am
As a counterpoint, I signed up for Google Mail a little over a year ago. I only use it to keep in contact with a single friend. He is the only person I gave that email address to. The only emails I have ever received on that account are from that friend.
I find it strange spammers haven’t brute forced my email address by now; there’s nothing special about it.
Note that not only do spammers brute force emails but theory has it that over 1/4 of computers on the internet are infected with BotNet (linux boxes included). Just think about what kind of viruses or spyware are floating around on your machine, watching what you type or digging through your data, and uploading it off site. Your email address was certainly compromised, but how do you know it wasn’t your own computer that compromised it?