Track Which Company Sells Your Personal Details with Gmail

We’ve already looked at how you can get your details off the SA National Consumer Database, but there is more you can do to protect yourself from spam and unsolicited sales calls.

An often overlooked but excellent feature of Gmail has a great application for consumer protection: the ability to allow you to track which company sells on your personal details. Firstly, I’ll explain how the feature works:

Firstly, Gmail email addresses are only based on the alpha-numeric characters only (ie numbers and letters). Anything else is discarded. So, if you own john.smith@gmail.com, you also own johnsmith@gmail.com, j.o.h.n-smith@gmail.com and so forth, and these will automatically come in to your usual inbox if mail is sent to them. Additionally, anything you include after a “+” sign at the end of the username is also ignored. So, in  something like john.smith+extrainfo@gmail.com, the whole “+extrainfo” is ignored.

Therefore, what this feature allows is for you to create “unique” addresses at the companies you do business with, at the same time allowing the emails to come back into your usual inbox. This will allow you to track which companies have sold your email address. For example, say you sign up to your bank with the email address “john.smith+bank@gmail.com”. Then you know that if you are contacted by another company that sends you a mail to “john.smith+bank@gmail.com” that it was your bank that initially sold on your details. Then you can challenge them on this, especially if you asked them not to share your details with third parties.

A simple feature, but one that has great implications in the fight against the illegal selling of your personal data.

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