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Are retailers selling my personal information?

Posted by on October 16, 2014

Having a personal domain and web/email server means that I can quickly and easily create ???@mattleech.com email addresses. I use this feature whenever a retailer asks for my email address by creating one that is exclusive to that retailer. E.g. kentucky-fried-chicken@mattleech.com. If I receive a spam/phishing email I can identify the To: address and block it, then inform the retailer that the address I provided them is being used for unsolicited email from a third-party, and I provide a new email address usually with a counter added. Any email address not in my whitelist gets blocked with an return error.

Over the past few days I’ve been receiving spam to the email address kia-lookers@mattleech.com so I sent the following message to Kia/Lookers customer support:

Hi
The email address that I created for exclusive
use by Kia/Lookers (kia-lookers@mattleech.com)
is being spammed. This is most likely the result
of client details being sold to a third-party or
personal information being acquired via
non-secure systems on your network.
Please remove my customer account from your
database.

…and then I provided my personal details and a new email address.