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There are isolated problems with current patches, but they are well-known and documented on this site. |
Not sure where to post this, maybe someone can point me elsewhere if appropriate…
Just received a detailed email (in Spam) from sender in topic title informing me that they are collecting my personal information for marketing purposes. Subject line reads, “Notice of personal information processing.” There are links in the message that supposedly offer an opt-out.
I’m assuming that the best move is to ignore this completely and not click on any links. Comments?
Do you recognize the sender? Do you recall subscribing to that service?
If it is service or subscription, which you do not use anymore, I recommend to sign out / opt out.
Using your personal information can mean/lead to increasing number of emails incoming to your email inbox )spam folder to be exact). It can be harmless, but it can become very annoying to receive 10 emails per day which you do not read. Important messages can be drown easily.
I recommend to get rid of all subscriptions you do not use, marketing emails content small link on the bottom of the page to unsubscribe.
If sender is MSFT, Google, Apple or other tchnological giant, its up to you whether you want to continue to use them.
Dell Latitude 3420, Intel Core i7 @ 2.8 GHz, 16GB RAM, W10 22H2 Enterprise
HAL3000, AMD Athlon 200GE @ 3,4 GHz, 8GB RAM, Fedora 29
PRUSA i3 MK3S+
If you click on anything, you may infect your PC.
If you opt-out you simply tell them your email address is valid (to use/sell).
Mark it as spam – then delete it. Then delete it from the trash.
Do you recognize the sender? Do you recall subscribing to that service?
Never heard if it before. No idea where this entity got my email address, as I try to be careful with personal info.
In the US, we are not protected by GDPR rules. “Unsubscribe” tells the sender your email is valid, then they can use it. They are not obligated by your wishes, statements.
They are not obligated by your wishes, statements.
I would argue that they are, morally. But this is marketing, where, like love and war, all is fair.
There are no morals in marketing.
If one has already ASKED for an email subscription after having determined that the source is reliable there should not be a problem asking to be unsubscribed. It mostly works. 
As Doriel has said above, Zoominfo is an information company for marketing. Do yourself a small favor, and Google the term “zoominfo” (without the quotes, of course) and look at the results. I just did, and I paid particular attention to the third listing for their main web site. The first two listings are ads because they have the word “Ad” in bold at the beginning of the listing. In the actual, non-ad, listing on Google, I found the following words:
“We combine the leading business contact database with best-in-class tech to pinpoint your customers & deliver the intelligence you need to hit your number.”
So, my guess is that they may have bought your email address from someone else you’ve done business with and whom you didn’t somehow tell NOT to share or sell your info. The other possibility is that they may have paid a service to “spam” emails out to every possible address within a certain domain (like xyzmail.com, for example) hoping to “get a live one” to use for a lead of some kind.
Either way, to me it sounds like the email may be on the up and up, but you never know these days. The best bet might be to go to their website and click on a link that’s probably towards the bottom of the main page that says “Privacy” or “Opt out”. That will lead you to the company’s privacy policy and that policy will tell you how to opt out from getting any more marketing from them and how to tell them to not sell your info to other entities. It will also tell you just what info they collect and just how they will use it.
Companies are nowadays required to honor any type of “Don’t sell my info” or opt-out requests or face heavy penalties. However, just because they’re required to doesn’t mean they will always honor one’s request, unfortunately. YMMV.
We take online privacy seriously and anything Google is off limits. A year ago when moving from Win7 to Linux, we replaced Chrome with Firefox and closed my gmail and Google accounts. We use Invidio as an end run around the intrusiveness of Youtube. We use mapsdirections.org rather than Google maps and Duckduckgo instead of Google search. On those rare occasions that some tentacle of Google shows up, we delete that cache and the cookies immediately.
Of course, multiple other entities do what they can to “harvest” personal info, and we try to nip them in the bud. How would you feel if, when making a purchase in a bricks-and-mortar store, they wouldn’t let you leave without supplying name, rank, and serial number, etc? Firefox is set to delete cookies and cached site data upon closing, but I usually do that manually during a browsing session if I have visited sites that plant them. Although FF sends “do not track” requests to visited sites, that appears to be useless, as personal info is valuable online currency. Google did not become one of the highest-capitalized companies in the world by giving away its services. We do recognize that maintaining a website costs money, however, and contribute to quite a few sites that provide free content, including Linux.
We get regular email blasts from Duckduckgo on the topic of privacy, and the latest one arrived yesterday with several helpful links, this one included: https://www.komando.com/kims-column/stop-amazon-from-sharing-private-info/747110/
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