I used to give each company a different email but got tired of keeping track of them all. And nowadays, what is email for, other than having a way for businesses to reach you? My friends and family mostly use chat and text messages, so email is mostly business notifications.
Yes, I also gave up on this many years ago, mainly because I've never caught a company misusing the unique email address I used to register.
What I still do is generating masked emails (using iCloud's Hide My Email) when signing up in weird websites. iCloud management is clunky, but it makes trivial to know what masked email belongs to what domain/app/service. I deleted a few in the past to turn off unwanted email messages.
I tried to be all privacy concerned with these things and Ive found myself locked out of multiple platforms because of it, so ymmv.
My old aol email literally told me I have to pay them to unlock my account, theres no way to recover an account when you’ve lost the 2fa to it, and so that account and every website depending on it is locked forever unless I wanna give them my birth cert and pay them.
Every other thing I used that 2fa for was easily recoverable, but that was my burner email so I kept it separate from the rest of my accounts.
I've done what I can to minimize my footprint. I switched to Linux many years ago, and recently switched to Graphene on my phone. I have a Google account, but I only sign in to check my rarely used Gmail account, then i immediately sign out. Well, now I think about it, I do click a like or subscribe to a Youtube channel now and again to help those channels, but that is also rare, and I immediately sign out. So, Google does get some information from me. I doubt I can cut it back much more.
I watch Youtube videos on a browser I've got set to never remember history. I know the channels I like and go to them directly.
Amazon knows more about me than anyone, and I can't see a good solution for them.
Amazon is a tough one because their success has caused local shops near me to just stop carrying as many regular things you used to be able to buy in person. It's super super annoying. That said, I deleted my Amazon account coming up on 2 years now and it's been so liberating.
skybrian | 9 hours ago
I used to give each company a different email but got tired of keeping track of them all. And nowadays, what is email for, other than having a way for businesses to reach you? My friends and family mostly use chat and text messages, so email is mostly business notifications.
[OP] rodrigo | 7 hours ago
Yes, I also gave up on this many years ago, mainly because I've never caught a company misusing the unique email address I used to register.
What I still do is generating masked emails (using iCloud's Hide My Email) when signing up in weird websites. iCloud management is clunky, but it makes trivial to know what masked email belongs to what domain/app/service. I deleted a few in the past to turn off unwanted email messages.
PetitPrince | 7 hours ago
TAP Air Portugal suffered a breach about 4 years ago. I knew it before everyone else because I received spam from the unique addresse I created.
snake_case | 7 hours ago
I tried to be all privacy concerned with these things and Ive found myself locked out of multiple platforms because of it, so ymmv.
My old aol email literally told me I have to pay them to unlock my account, theres no way to recover an account when you’ve lost the 2fa to it, and so that account and every website depending on it is locked forever unless I wanna give them my birth cert and pay them.
Every other thing I used that 2fa for was easily recoverable, but that was my burner email so I kept it separate from the rest of my accounts.
Kerry56 | 5 hours ago
I've done what I can to minimize my footprint. I switched to Linux many years ago, and recently switched to Graphene on my phone. I have a Google account, but I only sign in to check my rarely used Gmail account, then i immediately sign out. Well, now I think about it, I do click a like or subscribe to a Youtube channel now and again to help those channels, but that is also rare, and I immediately sign out. So, Google does get some information from me. I doubt I can cut it back much more.
I watch Youtube videos on a browser I've got set to never remember history. I know the channels I like and go to them directly.
Amazon knows more about me than anyone, and I can't see a good solution for them.
xothist | 5 hours ago
Amazon is a tough one because their success has caused local shops near me to just stop carrying as many regular things you used to be able to buy in person. It's super super annoying. That said, I deleted my Amazon account coming up on 2 years now and it's been so liberating.
Dangerous_Dan_McGrew | 4 hours ago
You mean instead of the regular kind of worthless that I already am?