Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by rckoepke 2346 days ago
This would severely backfire if the data broker thought someone else's email account was associated with your identity. Say:

Danny W[ilkins]

- Job Title

- Salary

- Job application records

- Social media post history

- Email 1: dannyw@gmail.com (correct)

- Email 2: dannywilkins@EmployerLLC.com (correct)

- Email 3: dannywinters@hotmail.com (not correct)

I'd assume they'd send the email containing your salary and post history to the two valid emails as well as the one invalid email.

That seems like a potential nightmare for you, for example records of job searches being sent to your employer email.

1 comments

Also, there's the situation of people who receive a lot of emails from services where the user mistyped their email, but the service doesn't validate the registered email.

In my case, I always feel I'm fighting a losing battle against the horde of emails addressed to users of unknown services...

There are a growing number of services that validate the email and include a "I didn't register at this service".

This has me worried, because I can imagine so many scenarios where the metadata aggregators scrape and mis-classify by email:

A teenage boy using a Snapchat-like service had created an account with my email and I had to manually delete it; some guy used my email to register his account at a MacDonald's franchise's ERP; I once received a booking confirmation from some large airline (and Google nicely reminded me that I had an upcoming flight); also, I was once wrongfully tagged by email in an unlisted web album of a party that had taken place in a French village by an older lady.

I always try to reach out to notify the person... But sometimes it's hard to call a Peruvian bank to notify them that one of their account holders used my email to register his account, and they tell you they'll get around to notifying the user, but don't.

Now; I could imagine several scenarios where things might get bumpy for me in the near future...

Like in the event where someone tries to forecast criminal behavior; or what if a government thinks I should be paying taxes on some income that their metadata suggests I have (because, why else would you have emails in your inbox from that bank?).