Not too long ago I wrote about DoNotTrackMe from Abine which blocks all sorts of tracking cookies from being accepted by your web browser. It’s a good way to stop targeted advertising as well as companies building up a profile on your browsing habits.
However, it can be just as bad when you have to signup to new websites and services and provide your e-mail address. People may give this out more freely than their personal phone numbers but it provides an easy way for websites to track your activities if they collude together or sell that data off to third parties. Whilst they may not pass on your e-mail address in the clear they may provide something like a hash of the e-mail address which can be lined up against other records in the possession of the third party.
Plus, when you start getting spammed from other parties you’ve never heard of it can be hard to determine where the leakage of your e-mail address has occurred.
Well, Abine has another service to help you out in the form of MaskMe.
MaskMe provides the ability to create masked e-mail addresses which you can either forward to your proper e-mail address or allow to aggregate at the MaskMe site for later review. However, if you go for the aggregation option then e-mails will only be kept for four hours before they are deleted which may not be convenient. You can create as many masked e-mail addresses as you like so you can have one for each service which then makes it a snap to work out which service has leaked your address if you start getting spam. At that point, you can block that specific masked address from receiving any further e-mails and create a new one (if you so wish).
This way, your actual e-mail address is never revealed and you can keep a lid on spam – a fantastic solution for a great price, free!
So check out MaskMe from Abine and give it a shot.
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