How companies track you with your Email Address.

Introduction

For a long time now, big companies have the option for a reward card that gives you something back for your loyalty. In the US, supermarkets offer a Clubcard that gives you points on each purchase and access to a number of different vouchers.

What they don’t tell you is what they are doing with the data they collect from you on the things you buy.

Companies collect a profile of you.

Many companies will take that data and collect a profile of what exactly you are buying and use that information to sell things that you might like.

When companies buy this data use certain keys, such as your email address to cross reference and find you. When you register to any site and you enter your real email address they use cookies and see what you like, what you don’t like, where you shop, what you buy, et cetera. This helps them to target their advertising by targeting your personal information.

Not only do they target advertise about you, they will analyse your spending history and use that to see just how effective promotions or any other offers and rewards are.

What is being analysed?

Not only are offers and reward cards affected, also your Bank/Visa or Mastercard is being analysed by these companies. This information is then sold on to analytics providers such as Google Analytics. These analytics companies are then paid by companies to analyse trends to even store and collect more information about you.

Whilst this is something that is mentioned in privacy agreements for cards, often many people skip over these walls of text. The legalese makes it hard to understand and simply too much of a time sink to see what exactly companies are making you agree to, most people just accept the fact that everything is tracked and collected.

The problem is that many people simply do not know how closely all their information is being tracked. And that the data is being sold to a number of companies to help more aggressively advertise products to a particular demographic.

You can prevent all of the above by simply using an Temp Email Service also known as a Disposable Email Provider.

Using a temp mail service it is important to keep your identity anonymous and your personal life personal.

Thank you for reading this article.