Re: How come google sells my info to spammers or ?
From: PeterM (rpm_at_NOSPAM.dcn.org)
Date: 01/04/05
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Date: Mon, 3 Jan 2005 19:24:32 -0800
Wow, I will have to read this several times to really understand this. You
must be a genius, anyway, I appreciate you a lot for this very very
generous information................
I can't write as good as you can, so I will only try to understand what you
wrote, and hope I will get it.............Peter
"Vanguard" <see_signature> wrote in message
news:%23o8YUrb8EHA.1452@TK2MSFTNGP11.phx.gbl...
> "PeterM" <rpm@NOSPAM.dcn.org> wrote in message
> news:qfGdnaj0LLxm90TcRVn-hg@omsoft.com...
>>I recently went on google to look for a explanation on a medical
>>condition, and used a word that is not used that much. Today I get a ton
>>of spam with that word in the subject line, what is happening here. Is my
>>google search info being sold? I noticed that in AdAware there is a
>>section where info like the search stuff is saved, but it is classified as
>>not intrusive. Can someone read my computer to get the search term I use?
>>I run Spybot and AdAware every week. I have Zone Alarm and a hardware
>>firewall. I'm not paranoid, I just hate these spammers to get to
>>me.............Peter
>
>
> Don't know about Google selling off info (other than their policy at
> http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacy.html where they say they share
> non-personal aggregated data) but how could that be of harm to you
> regarding spam E-MAIL? After all, they (Google) never got your e-mail
> address. All they ever had was your IP address. You cannot be sent
> e-mail based on your IP address for several reasons, like you aren't the
> one running a mail server so the sender cannot connect to your IP address
> to use a mail server that doesn't exist there, and your IP address is not
> your IPS's e-mail address, and your IP address doesn't divulge the
> alphanumeric string used to identify your e-mail account, and probably
> more. Do you actually pay the extra cost of having a *static* IP address
> so you can be identified by that particular unchanging IP address? If so,
> somehow you divulged your e-mail address so it can be equated with your IP
> address but that only works if YOU are running the mail server that
> listens on THAT host with that IP address. It is likely that you get a
> dynamically assigned IP address. If you are a dial-up user, your IP
> address changes on every connect. If you are a cable/DSL user, you get to
> keep the IP address until its lease expires whereupon you *may* lose that
> IP address AFTER you disconnect from their DHCP server, like when shutting
> down the OS (if the ISP has lots of reserve in their DHCP-assigned pool of
> IP addresses then you might get the same one when you boot back up). So
> why would any spammer, advertiser, or anyone else try to identify your
> e-mail address (if they had it) to your [potentially] ever-changing IP
> address?
>
> Unless you divulge your e-mail address, the site you connect to only knows
> your IP address. It has to know your IP address so it knows where to
> return the traffic that you request, like their web page content. When you
> use the telephone, the other person doesn't know what is your credit card
> number unless you tell them. Them knowing your telephone number via
> Caller ID doesn't also divulge to them your credit card number.
>
> There are many ways to trick users into divulging their e-mail address.
> For example, Google has you optionally specify a contact e-mail address
> when you signup for a Gmail account. When you login to Gmail, it probably
> leaves a cookie on your computer. After finishing with Gmail, you then go
> browsing but their cookie is still around. So any links you navigate to
> or any images that are web bugs can see you by your IP address and track
> you by your IP address which now could be equated to your Gmail address in
> the Gmail cookies. Google has your secondary e-mail address in your Gmail
> account and could equate your IP address for web bugs or navigation back
> to that e-mail address, too, and let their advertisers know what it is
> along with your IP address so the advertiser could then equate your IP
> address discovered by their web bugs on Google pages or when you visit
> their sites (since you have to divulge your IP address to get the return
> traffic). Is that likely? No. Is it possible? Yes. Lots of stuff is
> possible but not probable. It is possible that Bill Gates will hand over
> his empire to me but it's not probable. If you are enamored with Gmail,
> don't specify a secondary or contact e-mail address (but your Gmail
> account remains susceptible). If you don't have a Gmail account, or you
> never logged into it, then all Google knows (and any web bugs in ads on
> Google's pages or for any sites you visit) is your IP address which is
> rarely static for end-users and that is NOT the same as your e-mail
> address. It's also possible that your own ISP might be divulging your
> e-mail address by equating it to your IP address they assigned to you so
> spammers using web bugs or when you visit their web pages that then get
> your IP address could equate it to your e-mail address with the info your
> ISP sold to them. Yeah, it's possible, but is it probable? If it's
> probable, you need to find a different e-mail provider.
>
> If you look at the headers for my newsgroup post here, my IP address as
> revealed by my ISP's "NNTP-Posting-Host" inserted header (who contracts
> with Giganews for NNTP service) is 66.41.236.110. Okay, so how are you
> going to send me e-mail based on that? Actually that is the IP address
> for my router but it wouldn't matter if I connected my computer directly
> to the cable modem. Try to use that IP address to have your mail server
> attempt to send me e-mail. It can't because there is no mail server
> running at that e-mail address. Even if I were running an e-mail server
> at that IP address and even if it used the default port numbers, the IP
> *address* is not the same as the *e-mail* address used to identify an
> account that is defined within the database used by that e-mail server.
>
> Without much of a good description, the "stuff" you're seeing in Ad-Aware
> regarding "info like the search stuff" sounds like it is alerting you to
> navigation info stored in the registry in MRUs (most recently used lists).
> That doesn't expose you to hazards with spammers. That exposes you to
> explaing your habits to your employer or parents. Many times you'll see
> posts requesting how to wipe MRUs because the kid doesn't want their
> parents to know that they've been hitting the porn sites.
>
> It is possible to retrieve information from you system using Java. For
> example, although you might use a NAT router that supposedly stealths your
> ports from unsolicited inbound traffic, a security test site might reveal
> your computer's true IP address behind that NAT router (or behind
> anything). Why? Because they downloaded and ran a Java applet or
> Javascript that then runs locally on your computer to query for your
> computer's IP address. For example, visit
> http://www.auditmypc.com/freescan/scanoptions.asp and notice the line:
>
> Our system detects your internal IP address as 192.168.x.x and your
> external address as 66.41.236.110.
>
> They used their Javascript to reveal your computer's actual IP address
> rather than what their server got from your router as the IP address that
> connected to it. But that is your numeric IP address, not your
> alphanumeric e-mail address defined within some mail server's database.
> Perhaps a Java applet or Javascript might go reading the content of your
> cookies or other files to discover your e-mail address. Someone familiar
> with Java applets and Javascript (they are NOT the same thing: one is a
> program that runs in a JVM and the other is a script running within the
> browser) will have to tell you how far into your system they can invade.
> If you think Google is using Java or Javascript to divulge your personal
> info, you could configure the Internet security zone to prompt you for
> Java and scripting so you'll know on which pages Google uses them. Be
> prepared to answer lots of prompts since most web sites seem to use
> scripts, and prepared to lose functionality or access to a site if you
> configure these to be disabled. There are Java[script] newsgroups that
> could answer better how those can be used for privacy disclosure.
>
> --
> _________________________________________________________________
> Post your replies to the newsgroup. Share with others.
> E-mail: news.vanguardATgmail.com (append "#NEWS#" to Subject)
> _________________________________________________________________
>
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