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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

Can we block sharing email addresses by default? It seems every time I sign in with Google the site / app starts SPAMming me without my consent.

It's pretty much why I don't use it: The SPAM.

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My gmail is quite old and well used, and it gets relatively little spam. I go through and aggressively unsubscribe link everything I don't want to see, and it surprisingly works. I get more spam on my @myname.tld address than my gmail even and I keep that one quieter.

Almost every site actually does unsubscribe, and those that don't get marked as junk.

I've maintained one vanity email for about 15 years. I use it for literally everything. I unsubscribe from everything.

It gets some typical low effort spam that the spam filters easily screen out, other than that it's pretty quite.

And we should also do something about website that consider you a "customer" when you've only started an order and entered your email but you've never pressed submit to complete the order.

Does that happen to you often?

Not often, but recently.

And after giving it some thought, I guess that I'm also in the wrong to believe that I have to press submit somewhere to agree to their policies.

This is a "nice" reminder that just entering my email in a text input is enough to send it to any website.

I love how the word submit takes on a second meaning in this context.

I guess "often" is relative, but this happens to me pretty regularly.

I live in Canada, and it's not always obvious if an American company ships here or not. If the answer isn't trivial to find, I'll do this:

  1. Add something to the cart
  2. Start the checkout process as a guest
  3. Fill in the boxes that pop up during the checkout process
  4. Close the tab when I see that the country dropdown only has USA available

On most websites these days, you're asked for your email before your mailing address. And after I abort the checkout, I'll get an annoying "Psst...you forgot something in your cart" email a few hours later even though I never made an account or placed an order with my email.

Stores built with Shopify do this so consistently that I have to assume it's an out-of-the-box feature you need to opt out of.

That's you/OAuth giving the provider your google account id, which is your @gmail.com email.

Google uses GAIA for ID though, which is not the same as gmail address

I don't generally want any site to have anything they can use that associates me with other sites. If 2 sites get the same email for me or the same GAIA id, or the same anything then I won't use the id system. (with obvious exceptions - see below)

This includes "privacy first" companies like Apple and their Apple Pay system where I went to a restaurant in SF. The bill was a QR code that took me to Toast with the option to pay via Apple Pay. The apple prompts told me my email address would be shared and there was no option to say "no" so I bailed out and paid the waiter directly.

Sometimes I need my real name and address for shipping. In those cases that can't be helped. I also have to give my CC card for a purchase. But there are sites I want to sign up for for which I don't need to give that info. A "one click to sign up" option would be useful if I knew it was giving random data. An example might be medium.com or substack.com. They don't need my real name nor do they need my "real" email. If I was sure this "one click sign up" didn't share a common one I'd consider using it.

Maybe even better, if it was managed similar to subscriptions in iOS where I could trivial revoke any membership at will from a central location, with the understanding that there'd be no recovery since signing up again would get random new data and so no way to associate the new with the old.

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