Privacy, What Privacy?
Posted in Miscellaneous on November 19th 2002 by Randy ReichardtGeoff and I were talking today about issues of privacy on the Internet, specifically how e-mails can be tracked down by bots and spiders, resulting tons of spam. Recently I deleted one of my aliases, lightspeed@telusplanet.net, because I was getting 15-20 spam messages a day on that one. Click on the “Contact” link to the right, and notice the e-mail that appears in the “To” field. It’s up to you to make the changes to that address; I don’t link to my actual e-mail address, because if I did, it would be one more place for the spiders and crawlers to find said e-mail address, and start spamming me.
Keith also discovered that information on my domain was publically available via a Whois server. This included my home address and unlisted phone number! (Thanks, Keith.) Since then, I’ve edited this information out from my domain registration site. Within 24 hours, my address and phone number no longer appeared in the Whois db (although my work phone number appears there now).
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