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Comment by kioleanu | Hacker News Reader

I use Fastmail for that and without noticing, I'm to 32 "fake" addresses. Got banned by EA for buying and playing a game with an account on such an address.

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Hah, that's dystopian. Taking precautions and being punished for it.

One man’s precautions are another man’s dataminig opportunity loss …

For EA it is less about datamining and more about flagging behavior that matches that of a cheater evading a ban. Cheaters reduce the fun, and therefore value, of a game.

I only own one game and it's offline, so there's that

If your concern is datamining, then you should be far more concerned about the billing info (which can't be faked) than the email.

FYI you can often set the billing address info to whatever you want for a lot of purchases, there's no mechanism to validate it.

>there's no mechanism to validate it.

Why would you spread falsehoods like that?

https://stripe.com/resources/more/what-is-address-verificati...

"Businesses in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom use AVS" I don't live in any of these countries. Even so it's more cost for business to use AVS, most won't. The likes of my mobile phone credit or Steam or Spotify or cloud services don't use any sort of address validation

with the state of most data mining programs out there, moving addresses will destroy any ability to link you.

Right but changing your billing address/credit card number is still way much harder than creating a new gmail/outlook account.

You got banned while using a Fastmail address? That's hard.

I used masked emails for almost everything and thankfully haven’t run into any issues like this

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