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Comment by orionblastar | Hacker News Reader

My Gmail is based on my real name and I had similar problems:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9502169

At least 300 men in the USA share the same name as me. I got my Gmail in 2005 so I got it firstname.lastname@gmail.com and others who got the same name as me enter it into websites all of the time. Most don't even validate the email, and sometimes I have to email the admins to get the account shut down.

I think websites have a resposibility to validate the email and delete the account if it isn't validate in a reasonable amount of time or have a link to delete the account if someone who signed up wasn't you.

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> I think websites have a responsibility to validate the email and delete the account if it isn't validate in a reasonable amount of time or have a link to delete the account if someone who signed up wasn't you.

You're talking about a business with questionable practices to begin with in that case, not a responsible one. These people are scammers like most of the dating websites.

Obviously the only thing they cared about was money. Offered to delete the account for $19 but just hid it instead of deleting it.

Ha! I have always been jealous of the people who got firstname.lastname@gmail.com but now I see that privilege has a price.

I have a very common first name / last name combo (it's awful, it's not 'John Smith' but frankly it may as well be.)

I worked at a large corporate where there were four people who shared that combo.

We constantly got each others email and meeting requests.

One of them wouldn't have any of it but the other two and myself got to the point where we'd forward an email with a comment like: "Hey, your wife isn't able to fetch the baby from creche this afternoon, see below."

In a weird way I kind of miss it.

> I think websites have a resposibility to validate the email and delete the account if it isn't validate in a reasonable amount of time or have a link to delete the account if someone who signed up wasn't you.

Why do you think this? It would help if you pointed to a statute imposing this obligation, as I've never heard of one.

You might do better to make an argument that they had an obligation to delete the accounts of people who paid them specifically for the service of deleting their account. Which it appears that in many or all cases, they did not.

Alas there is no statute that protects people and their email addresses from abuse in this way.

Anyone can enter an email into a webform even one that isn't even theirs and create an account and get away with it. I myself never found out who was entering my email into dating sites and other places. I wanted to talk to them and tell them to stop, but I was powerless to do anything.

When you share a name with 300 other men in the USA, and some of them forgot to enter a number or series of letters for their own address, it comes back to my address.

My point is that I found out the hard way that most websites don't even bother to validate the email, take any email, and people who own that email get unwanted messages from that site.

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