[LINK] personally-held collections of personal data

[Jan Whitaker]

At 03:56 PM 23/03/2013, Richard wrote:

>I have been wondering the same thing. I'm hoping to make an article out
>of it, but the early signs aren't encouraging: the privacy lawyers I've
>spoken to so far were pretty sure that the Privacy Act doesn't sweep
>this up yet.

Here's an example, but my assumptions didn't hold.

Twice I've had an email saying that a person I know in the US had 
added me as a contact in something called Twoo or included me in 
another thing called Fanbox. The Fanbox one continues telling me how 
much money I've earned through some sort of click-through SOE thing.

When the Twoo email came today, I wrote to the guy and asked him to 
remove me from his contacts list because these things are scams and a 
way to get real email addresses that are then onsold to further 
scammers. He replied that he hadn't done anything to share contacts 
with either of these email sources. I am connected to him on LinkedIn 
and we both belong to a yahoo group.

Looking at the header info, I find: "Sender email is commonly abused 
enduser mail provider
                              (name[at]yahoo.com)"

Are these scams more likely a result of the yahoo hack? Is it no 
longer possible to know how these scammers get addresses?

Jan



Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
jwhit at janwhitaker.com
blog: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
business: http://www.janwhitaker.com

Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or 
sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth.
~Madeline L'Engle, writer

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