Everyone Wants Your Email Address. Think Twice Before Sharing It. Your email address has become a digital bread crumb for companies to link your activity across sites. Here’s how you can limit this.
Your email address has become a shortcut for companies to link your activity between sites.
When you browse the web and enter your email on a site you are helping companies link your activity on sites and apps to serve you relevant ads.
The digital advertising industry has targeted invisible trackers placed within websites and apps to track our activities and then show us targeted ads. There have been sweeping changes to this system to prevent these invisible trackers that allow users to block apps from being tracked, among other methods.
Advertisers, web publishers and app makers are now trying to track people through other means, such as asking for an email address, as this can link to other data. “I can take your email address and find data that you may not have even realized you've given to a brand,” said Michael Priem, chief executive of Modern Impact, a Minneapolis advertising firm. “The amount of data out there about us as consumers is literally staggering.”
Your email address has become a potent piece of data.
For 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 ground is Unified ID 2.0, or UID 2.0, which was developed by Trade Desk. Once you share your email to a website with UID 2.0 it transforms it into a token made up of a string of digits and characters. That token travels with your email address when you use it to sign in to a preview streaming app on your TV that u
ses UID 2.0. Advertisers can link the two accounts based on the token, and can target it with ads for that product. Since your email address is not revealed
to the advertiser, UID 2.0 can 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.
How to limit the ability of advertising companies to target us based on email address? Every time a site or app asks for your email, you can create a unique sign-in address. That would make it difficult for ad tech companies to compile a profile based on your email address. And if you're getting spam on a specific account, that tells you which company is sharing your data with marketers.
Use email masking tools. Apple and Mozilla offer tools that automatically create email aliases for signing in to an app or site; emails sent to aliases are forwarded to your real email address
Source: NYtimes
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