When you browse the web, an
increasing number of sites and apps are asking for a piece of basic information
that you probably hand over without hesitation: your email address.
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It may seem harmless, but when you enter
your email, you are sharing a lot more than just that. I am hoping this column,
which includes some workarounds, persuades you to think twice before handing
over your email address.
First, it helps to know why companies want
email addresses. To advertisers, web publishers, and app makers, your email is
important not just for contacting you. It acts as a digital breadcrumb for
companies to link your activity across sites and apps to serve you relevant
ads.
If this all sounds familiar, that is
because it is.
For decades, the digital advertising
industry relied on invisible trackers planted inside websites and apps to
follow our activities and then serve us targeted ads. There have been sweeping
changes to this system in the past few years, including Apple’s release of a
software feature in 2021 allowing iPhone users to block apps from tracking them
and Google’s decision to prevent websites from using cookies, which follow
people’s activities across sites, in its Chrome browser by 2024.
“The amount of data that is out there on us as consumers is literally shocking.”
Advertisers, web publishers, and app makers
now try to track people through other means — and one simple method is by
asking for an email address.
Imagine if an employee of a
brick-and-mortar store asked for your name before you entered. An email address
can be even more revealing, though, because it can be linked to other data, including
where you went to school, the make and model of the car you drive, and your
ethnicity.
“I can take your email address and find
data you may not have even realized you’ve given to a brand,” said Michael
Priem, CEO of Modern Impact, an advertising firm in Minneapolis. “The amount of
data that is out there on us as consumers is literally shocking.”
Advertising tech is continuing to evolve,
so it helps to understand what exactly you are sharing when you enter in an
email address. From there, you can decide what to do.
Your email address has become a potent
piece of dataFor many years, the digital ad industry has
compiled a profile on you based on the sites you visit on the web. Information
about you used to be collected in covert ways, including the aforementioned
cookies and invisible trackers planted inside apps. Now that more companies are
blocking the use of those methods, new ad targeting techniques have emerged.
One technology that is gaining traction is
an advertising framework called Unified ID 2.0, or UID 2.0, which was developed
by the Trade Desk, an ad-technology company in Ventura, California.
Say, for example, you are shopping on a
sneaker website using UID 2.0 when a prompt pops up and asks you to share your
email address and agree to receive relevant advertising. Once you enter your
email, UID 2.0 transforms it into a token composed of a string of digits and
characters. That token travels with your email address when you use it to log
in to a sports streaming app on your TV that uses UID 2.0. Advertisers can link
the two accounts together based on the token, and they can target you with
sneaker ads on the sports streaming app because they know you visited the
sneaker website.
Since your email address is not revealed to
the advertiser, UID 2.0 may be seen as a step up for consumers from traditional
cookie-based tracking, which gives advertisers access to your detailed browsing
history and personal information.
“Websites and apps are increasingly asking
for email authentication in part because there needs to be a better way for
publishers to monetize their content that’s more privacy-centric than cookies,”
Ian Colley, the chief marketing officer of the Trade Desk, said in an email.
“The internet is not free, after all.”
However, in an analysis, Mozilla, the
nonprofit that makes the Firefox web browser, called UID 2.0 a “regression in
privacy” because it enabled the type of tracking behavior that modern web
browsers were designed to prevent.
So what to do?There are various options for limiting the
ability of advertising companies to target you based on your email address:
“Websites and apps are increasingly asking for email authentication in part because there needs to be a better way for publishers to monetize their content that’s more privacy-centric than cookies.”
—Create a bunch of email addresses: Each
time a site or an app asks for your email, you could create a unique address to
log in to it, such as, for example,
[email protected] for
movie-related apps and services. That would make it hard for ad tech companies
to compile a profile based on your email handle. And if you receive spam mail
to a specific account, that will tell you which company is sharing your data
with marketers. This is an extreme approach, because it is time-consuming to
manage so many email addresses and their passwords.
—Use email-masking tools: Apple and Mozilla
offer tools that automatically create email aliases for logging in to an app or
a site; emails sent to the aliases are forwarded to your real email address.
Apple’s Hide My Email tool, which is part of its iCloud+ subscription service
that costs 99 cents a month, will create aliases, but using it will make it
more difficult to log in to the accounts from a non-Apple device. Mozilla’s
Firefox Relay will generate five email aliases at no cost; beyond that, the
program charges 99 cents a month for additional aliases.
—When possible, opt out: For sites using
the UID 2.0 framework for ad targeting, you can opt out by entering your email
address at https://transparentadvertising.org. (Not all sites that collect your
email address are using UID 2.0, however.)
You could also do nothing. If you enjoy
receiving relevant advertising and have no privacy concerns, you can accept
that sharing some information about yourself is part of the transaction for
receiving content on the internet.
I try to take a cautious but moderate
approach. I juggle four email accounts devoted to my main interests — food,
travel, fitness, and movies. I will use the movie-related email address, for
example, when I am logging in to a site to buy movie tickets or stream videos.
That way, those sites and apps will know about my movie preferences, but they
will not know everything about me.
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