Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Re: [android-developers] Your email address may be being harvested! Please take action.

I understand  your point. The internet is a public place and everyone needs to come to terms with the fact that what they say can be found and used by anyone, even years later. What I don't find acceptable is the plain text revealing of my email address. This is not out of some missguided desire to protect my privacy, but simply to prevent spam. I have no issue letting my email address be known to any real human being, but when it's placed in such a manner that it can be so easily gleaned by any passong spambot, that's just not okay. Most sites are carefult to obfuscate email addresses by seperating the address from the domain, or removing part of the address, or forming the address into a picture.
 
At the very least this website is engadging in infrigement by impersonating this Google Groups page. It's entire extistance is duplicating content for ad clicks. A violation of Blogger's TOS and clearly spam. Normaly I really woulden't care so much if it wasn't for the plain text email thing. Please help me take down this site or I simply don't feel safe posting to this forum with my regular email account. I don't want to get any more spam than I've already gotten.
 
Whoever made this site clearly won't be missing it anyway, it's hardly maintained!

On Tuesday, August 7, 2012 7:58:23 PM UTC-7, Kristopher Micinski wrote:
This group is publicly indexed, meaning anything you post will live on
the internet forever.

This is good and bad.  The good is that if you say something worth
noting, it lives there and is archived for all to see, so you can
refer back to it at a later time.

The bad is that if you say something dumb or accidentally paste a pic
of one of your friends, it's going to be forever archived and will
possibly come back to byte you in a major way.  (Let's face it,
employers Google names, and if you're being a downright unhelpful ass
all over a public forum, it's probably not going to help your future
employment possibilities..)

Another bad: since they're archived, tons of spambots will send you
all sorts of links, and you'll get a bunch of incomprehensible job
advertisements..

kris

On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 1:24 PM, NMunoz <nathan...@gmail.com> wrote:
> A few days ago I noticed some spam mail in my Gmail inbox and even more in
> my spam folder, all very recent. This came as a bit of a surprise to me as
> my email address is relatively new and I had thus far been very careful to
> protect it. So I did a simple Google search for my plain text email address.
> To my horror, it returned a post I had made to the Android Developer Google
> Group not long ago. The result wasn't part of Google Groups but rather some
> sort of mirroring blog that had reposted my Google Groups post. In general,
> Google Groups makes an effort to conceal your email address, but this
> mirroring site displays it prominently in plain text along with your post.
>
> I don't think the purpose of this blog is specifically malice, but rather to
> collect on advertising accrued from people searching for these posts.
> However, the dreadful mistake of displaying plain text email addresses makes
> your email easy prey for a spider, a program used by spammers to harvest
> email addresses from the web. Either way the site is spam and should be
> taken down. The site can be found here.
>
> http://newsandroidnet.blogspot.com/
>
> If you're interested in protecting your email address and those of others on
> this Google Group from spam I highly urge you to report this blog to Blogger
> as a terms of service violation under spam.
>
> http://support.google.com/blogger/bin/request.py?hl=en&contact_type=main_tos
>
> If you can specifically locate your information on the site I also suggest
> you take the additional step of reporting it to Blogger as posting of your
> private information in the hopes that the post may be individually removed.
>
> I have already made both of these reports and await action. If enough people
> report, the action may be swift.
>
> Thank you.
>
> --
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