I hate junk mail, so rarely give out my e-mail address. Am I naive in believing most legitimate companies/organizations aren’t sharing it / giving it away?
Create a second email account that is not one you share with friends and family. Use it only with companies you do business with or when seeking information. We have a separate college e mail account for D2. She typically gets 5-20 emails a day from colleges currently. Her personal e-mail is just for friends and family. Just be sure to check the 2nd email account regularly. You can then bulk delete all of the emails because they’re junk.
Yes. It all depends upon the ‘terms of service’ or ‘privacy statement’ that you agree to when you give it out.
Some will never share. Others will only share with subsidiaries. Some sell it like it is a clearance sale.
Suggestion: Get a few email addresses that you only use for specific purposes. Save your ‘real’ address for better protection.
There are also bigger risks than business sharing. Those ‘chain’ emails that often seem harmless are typically used to gather information (like your email address) and then it is sold to others for money. Anything from prayer to jokes. Some will seem legit. Don’t forward that stuff.
There are also some ‘bots’ that literally randomly send emails to potential email addresses. These are typically spam or phishing attempts.
Internet security is a big thing.
How about a school or a city giving it to anyone who asks, claiming it’s public information?
It’s not public information. Your street address is. Your email address is not.
Read the terms of service carefully. Be wary of posts like the above that state as absolute truths what may not be.
Email address is considered as PII (personal identifiable information). Institutions have responsibility to safe guard the information:
http://www.dol.gov/dol/ppii.htm
Most corporations are very careful about PII. We are required to put additional security around PII data, like encryption, and only allow few designated people to have access to it. Firms have “opt out” program where customers can opt out of giving their PII. My firm can’t even share customer data between different business unit, especially for marketing.
You are not wrong to expect your email not to be shared without your permission.
I had one of the early AOL email addresses that I only used for family. But tons of strangers have accidentally used it because it’s close in spelling to their emails. So I gave up and don’t use it any more; almost all I get is spam that they apparently generated. The latest misuse is now generating porn type spam - yuk. My newer email isn’t a problem so that’s all I use now.
I get a second email for stuff, but Google has been good. I don’t have spams at all, but yahoo is a different story.