Privacy

iOS17 filtering click tracking links

I’ve heard quite a bit of concern about what iOS 17’s automatic removal of click-tracking parameters means, but less discussion of what it actually does.

Email verification vendor leaking marketer data

I’ve been waiting for this to happen. An email verification vendor has left their database of 800 million email addresses along with detailed individual data. unprotected on the internet. Bob Diachenko reported the discovery yesterday on his blog. Wired also ran an article (An Email Marketing Company Left 809 Million Records Exposed Online) based on his findings.

Privacy and tracking

“I can’t believe you are wearing one of those,” they said while sneering at the Pebble watch I was wearing. Yes, that’s how someone introduced themselves to me at a conference last year. Apparently, I’m not allowed to wear smartwatches, or something. It wasn’t clear what their problem was or why they thought that was a good opening line. Best I can figure, it was some commentary on the hypocrisy of me wearing a smartwatch and claiming to be pro-privacy.

OTA joins the ISOC

The Online Trust Alliance (OTA) announced today they were joining forces with the Internet Society (ISOC). Starting in May, they will operate as an initiative under the ISOC umbrella.
“The Internet Society and OTA share the belief that trust is the key issue in defining the future value of the Internet,” said Internet Society President and CEO, Kathryn Brown. “Now is the right time for these two organizations to come together to help build user trust in the Internet. At a time when cyber-attacks and identity theft are on the rise, this partnership will help improve security and data privacy for users,” added Brown.

Electronic records outside US not covered by US warrants

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Government today in US Government vs. Microsoft. The government is investigating a drug dealer and want access to records held by Microsoft. Microsoft turned over metadata stored on US machines. But they refused to turn over the specific emails stored on machines in Dublin. The company’s position is that the federal government needs to follow the rules of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between the US and Ireland.
This has been winding its way through the appeals court.
The court’s ruling today states “§ 2703 of the Stored Communications Act does not authorize courts to issue and enforce against U.S.‐based service providers warrants for the seizure of customer e‐mail content that is stored exclusively on foreign servers.”
An interesting ruling, and I see pros and cons to the ruling. It does complicate anti-spam enforcement a bit and make it easier for criminals to hide their data overseas while they might be in the US. But it’s already easy for them to do that. Many arrests of spam gangs and others for crimes committed on the Internet over email involve multiple law enforcement agencies across the world.
Full text of the ruling (.pdf link)

US-EU Privacy Shield Approved

Since the Safe Harbor rules were struck down by EU courts, the US and EU have been in negotiations to replace it. This morning (pacific time) the EU approved the new rules called Privacy Shield. WSJ Article

FCC notice of proposed rulemaking

The FCC recently published a notice of proposed rulemaking that will have an impact on how we fight abuse on the internet. M³AAWG has submitted a comment on the proposal (pdf link). All submissions can be found on the FCC website.

March 2016: The Month In Email

Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned!

Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March:
On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and Steve offered some advice for ESPs and software developers on methods for handling this gracefully. I also answered an Ask Laura question about making the decision to publish DMARC. Look for more on that in this month’s Ask Laura questions…
Our other Ask Laura question this month was about changing ESPs, which senders do for many reasons. It’s useful to know that there will generally be some shifts in deliverability with any move. Different ESPs measure engagement in different ways, and other issues may arise in the transition, so it’s good to be aware of these if you’re contemplating a change.
In industry news, I wrote a sort of meta-post about how the Internet is hard (related: where do you stand on the great Internet vs. internet debate? Comment below!) and we saw several examples of that this month, including a privacy debacle at Florida State University. Marketing is hard, too. I revisited an old post about a fraud case where a woman sued Toyota over an email marketing “prank”. As always, my best practices recommendation for these sorts of things (and everything else!) really boils down to one thing: send wanted email.
Steve wrote extensively about SPF this month in two must-read posts, where he explained the SPF rule of ten and how to optimize your SPF records. He also wrote about Mutt, the much-loved command line email client, and marked the passing of industry pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who, in addition to his many accomplishments, was by all accounts a very thoughtful and generous man.
Finally, I occasionally like to take a moment and follow the twisty paths that lead to my spam folder. Here’s a look at how Ugg spams my email doppelganger, MRS LAURA CORBISHLEY. In other spam news, there’s a lot of very interesting data in the recent 10 Worst list from Spamhaus. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

September 2015: The month in email

September’s big adventure was our trip to Stockholm, where I gave the keynote address at the APSIS Conference (Look for a wrapup post with beautiful photos of palaces soon!) and had lots of interesting conversations about all things email-related.
Now that we’re back, we’re working with clients as they prepare for the holiday mailing season. We wrote a post on why it’s so important to make sure you’ve optimized your deliverability strategy and resolved any open issues well in advance of your sends. Steve covered some similar territory in his post “Outrunning the Bear”. If you haven’t started planning, start now. If you need some help, give us a call.
In that post, we talked a bit about the increased volumes of both marketing and transactional email during the holiday season, and I did a followup post this week about how transactional email is defined — or not — both by practice and by law. I also wrote a bit about reputation and once again emphasized that sending mail people actually want is really the only strategy that can work in the long term.
While we were gone, I got a lot of spam, including a depressing amount of what I call “legitimate spam” — not just porn and pharmaceuticals, but legitimate companies with appalling address acquisition and sending strategies. I also wrote about spamtraps again (bookmark this post if you need more information on spamtraps, as I linked to several previous discussions we’ve had on the subject) and how we need to start viewing them as symptoms of larger list problems, not something that, once eradicated, means a list is healthy. I also posted about Jan Schaumann’s survey on internet operations, and how this relates to the larger discussions we’ve had on the power of systems administrators to manage mail (see Meri’s excellent post here<).
I wrote about privacy and tracking online and how it’s shifted over the past two decades. With marketers collecting and tracking more and more data, including personally-identifiable information (PII), the risks of organizational doxxing are significant. Moreso than ever before, marketers need to be aware of security issues. On the topic of security and cybercrime, Steve posted about two factor authentication, and how companies might consider providing incentives for customers to adopt this model.

Privacy and being online

I have an email address that’s old enough to drink. It came to me today when I was discussing data hygiene. I mean, I have an email address that is old enough to drink! And it wasn’t even my first email address, it’s just the one I still have access to.
This realization led me down a path of what things have changed since I got that address.
I remember … DataSecurity_Illustration
… when things posted on the Internet weren’t around forever.
… when Google bought DejaNews and made USENET archives more available.

Experian selling data to identity thieves

If you’re not following or reading Brian Krebs, you should be. He does some of the best investigative reporting in the email, security and internet space. Today’s blog post is a disturbing look into the data selling and identity theft industries. Brian details evidence that shows Experian (yes, that Experian) has been selling consumer data to identity thieves.

Misdirected email

While this does seem to be more common with gmail addresses, it’s not solely limited to gmail. I’ve written about this frequently.

Google wiretapping case, what the judge ruled

Yesterday I reported that the judge had ruled on Google’s motion to dismiss. Today I’ll take a little bit deeper look at the case and the interesting things that were in denial of the motion to dismiss.
Google is being sued for violations of federal wiretapping laws, the California invasion of privacy act (CIPA) and wiretapping laws in Florida, Pennsylvania and Maryland. This lawsuit is awaiting class certification for the following groups.

Judge sides with plaintiff, refuses to dismiss wiretapping suit against Google

Judge Koh published her ruling on Google’s motion to dismiss today.
It’s a 43 page ruling, which I’m still digesting. But the short answer is that Google’s motion was denied almost in total. Google’s motion was granted for two of the claims: that email is confidential as defined by the California Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA, section 632) and dismissal of a claim under Pennsylvania law.

Recycled Yahoo addresses and PII leaks

Infoweek interviewed a number of people who acquired new Yahoo addresses during Yahoo’s address recycling and reuse process. It seems that at least for some small percentage of former Yahoo users, there is a major risk of information going to the wrong people.

No expectation of privacy, says Google

I spent yesterday afternoon in Judge Koh’s courtroom listening to arguments on whether or not the class action suit against Google based on their scanning of emails for advertising purposes can go forward. This is the case that made news a few weeks ago because Google stated in their brief that users have “no expectation of privacy” in using online services.
That does appear to be what Google is actually saying, based on the arguments by attorney Whitty Somvichian. He made it clear that Google considers everything that passes through their servers, including the content of emails, covered under “information provided to Google” in the privacy policy. Google is arguing that they can read, scan, and use that content to display ads and anything else they consider to be in the normal course of business.
I have pages and pages of notes but I have some paying work to finish before I can focus on writing up the case. There were multiple reporters and bloggers in the courtroom, but I’ve not found many article. Some I’ve found are:

Gmail says no expectation of privacy, kinda.

Consumer Watch put out a press release yesterday about a court filing made by Gmail that says Gmail users have no expectation of privacy. I pulled a bunch of the docs yesterday, but have had no real time to read or digest them.
For recap users everything I pulled (and stuff other people have pulled) are available at Archive.org.
The initial complaint was filed under seal at the request of Google. The redacted complaint doesn’t tell us a lot, but it’s available for people to read if they’re interested.
The doc everyone is talking about is Google’s Motion to Dismiss. Everyone is up in arms about Google saying, in that filing, “a person has no legitimate expectation of privacy in information he voluntarily turns over to third parties.” (page 28, line 9). What no one seems to have mentioned is that this is actually a quote from a case that Google is referencing. The whole paragraph may lead one to a different conclusion.

Sending mail to the wrong person, part eleventy

Another person has written another blog post talking about their experiences with an email address a lot of people add to mailing lists without actually owning the email address. In this case the address isn’t a person’s name, but is rather just what happens when you type across rows on they keyboard.
These are similar suggestions to those I (and others) have made in the past. It all boils down to allow people who never signed up for your list, even if someone gave you their email address, to tell you ‘This isn’t me.” A simple link in the mail, and a process to stop all mail to that address (and confirm it is true if someone tries to give it to you again), will stop a lot of unwanted and unasked for email.

Spamming to hide fraud

An interesting article at NetworkWorld last month, describing spam bombs to victims of fraud and identity theft to hide the transactions and notifications from financial institutions.

Email verification – what are we verifying

One of the ongoing discussions in the email space is the one about address verification. Multiple companies have sprung up to do “real time” email address verification. They ensure that addresses collected at the point of sale are valid.
But what does valid mean? In most of these contexts, valid means that the addresses don’t bounce and aren’t spam traps. And that is one part of validating email addresses.
That isn’t the only part, though. In my opinion, an even more important thing to validate is that the email address belongs to the person giving it to you. The Consumerist has had an ongoing series of articles discussing people getting mis-directed email from various companies.
Today the culprit is AT&T, who are sending a lot of personal information to an email address of someone totally unconnected to that account. There are a lot of big problems with this, and it’s not just in the realm of email delivery.
The biggest problem, as I see it, is that AT&T is exposing personally identifiable information (PII) to third parties. What’s even worse, though, is that AT&T has no process in place for the recipient to correct the issue. Even when notified of the problem, support can’t do anything to fix the problem.

Motion to dismiss in Penkava v. Yahoo case

Earlier this month Yahoo filed a motion to dismiss in the Penkava v. Yahoo. This is the class action lawsuit where an Alabama resident is attempting to sue Yahoo for violation of the California wiretapping law.
Here’s the short synopsis.
People send mail to Yahoo. Yahoo “creeps and peeps” on that mail so they can profit from it. Plaintiff doesn’t like this, and thinks that he can use the California Invasion of Privacy Act (“CIPA”), (Cal. Penal Code § 630, et seq;) to stop Yahoo from doing this. Additionally, there is a whole class of people who live in every state but California who have also been harmed by Yahoo’s actions. The plaintiff would like the court to make Yahoo stop doing this. (First Amended Complaint)
Yahoo’s motion to dismiss is actually pretty dry and there aren’t really any zinger pull quotes that make sense without reading the whole 35 pages. The short version is that what Yahoo is doing is not a violation of California law, it is simply handling email as it has to be done to get it to recipients. Plus, California law cannot apply to mail sent from a non-CA resident to a non-CA resident because that would violate the dormant commerce clause. The class as defined makes no sense. Finally, the plaintiff continues to send mail to Yahoo addresses knowing the mail is being “scanned” and that is implicit permission for Yahoo to do it.
In the initial complaint there was an allegation that Yahoo’s behaviour was a violation of Federal and/or California Wiretapping laws. These allegations appear to have been dropped in the First Amended Complaint.
Right now there is a hearing scheduled for March 13, 2013. I’ll keep an eye on the filings.

New EU directives

The EU has published consumer protection directives. Members states have 2 years to implement and enforce these directives.
The interesting bit is this:

Spam lawsuit guide

Mailchimp has released a guide to spam lawsuits with advice on how to not be a target.
I had the pleasure of meeting some of the Mailchimp legal staff last year when I was down there to do on-site training for their abuse desk employees. I was quite impressed with them and their understanding of privacy and email issues.

Light blogging for a while

Sorry for the lack of substantive posts, things seem to have gone completely out of control and I’m not finding a lot of extra cycles to sit down and blog. I’ll try and get some stuff up this week, but I’m also getting ready for MAAWG and the sessions I’m a part of there.
There was an interesting post by Romer over on his personal blog. If you don’t know, Romer helps maintain one of the commercial mail filters. He recently got spammed by one of his vendors and talked about how this is probably not the best idea. Al adds his own take on companies assuming permission. I’ve talked about taking permission in the past but haven’t touched on things like “spamming the guy who runs the filter.”
You’d be surprised, or maybe you wouldn’t, about how many people who run filters for large organizations get spammed regularly. You wouldn’t be surprised to find out that those people do factor in their own personal spam load when adjusting their organizational filters.

Email and law in the news

A couple things related to the intersection of email and law happened recently.
The 6th circuit court ruled that the government must have a search warrant before accessing email. The published opinion is interesting reading, not just because of the courts ruling on the law but also because of the defendant. Berkeley Premium Nutraceuticals toyed with spamming to advertise their product as a brief search of public reporting sites shows. The extent and effort they went to in order to stay below the thresholds for losing their merchant accounts is reminiscent of the effort some mailers go through to get mail through ISP filters.
The other bit of interesting reading is the Microsoft motion to dismiss the case brought against them by Holomaxx. It is a relatively short brief (33 pages) and 3 of those pages are simply a listing of the relevant cases demonstrating ISPs are allowed to filter mail as they see fit. 2 more pages are dedicated to listing the relevant Federal and State statutes. I strongly encourage anyone considering suing any large ISP to to read this pleading. These lawyers understand email law inside and out and they are not going to mess around. They also have both statute and case law on their side. They point this out before the end of page 1:

Broken Policies

As an email policy wonk, I think a lot about how specific policy implementations can go wrong. Sure, every policy can go wrong, or not fit a common case. A lot of people only write polices that address common cases and don’t worry about the rarer cases. The problem is there are some rare cases that may cause significant harm and those cases should be addressed.
Consumerist has a case up about email policy gone wrong with a clear path to harm but no policy for handling the issue. There are a couple places I see where this policy hole can be fixed.
Chase Bank does no verification when they collect email addresses, which results in them sending email to a person who does not have an account with Chase. This is not an ideal situation for anyone. Chase is revealing private financial information to an outside party, the actual bank customer is not getting their information and someone is getting email about money that’s not theirs.
In terms of policy for institutions handling sensitive personal information, I would always recommend implementing a verification step. This is mail that people want so they should confirm it. It’s also mail that really should be not going to 3rd parties.
Chase does not implement any verification step for email. This isn’t a fatal problem, as long as there is some process in place to get feedback and then correct the issue.
Unfortunately, Chase’s policies failed here, too. Chase requires an account number to speak to a representative about any issues. In this case, the email recipient does not have an account number. All of Chase’s contact channels rely on an account number: no account number, no talking to a human.
In terms of overall policy Chase is hoping here is that, at some point, their actual customer will notice they’re not getting email and call in and attempt to troubleshoot the problem with Chase reps. I’m willing to bet, though, that their tier 1 people don’t have the training or information needed to troubleshoot this problem. I expect they’re going to read the script that says, “We sent you the mail, it must be a problem on your end. Have a nice day.”
Chase, and other bank analogues that require an account number, that do not verify email addresses should not require account numbers to talk to someone about the mail they are receiving. Why? Because although it’s reasonably rare that the mail is going to the wrong party, the potential harm to the bank’s customer is very high. This danger to customers means the bank should invest in a support pathway that allows non-customers to call, or write, to report misdirected email.
If Chase were my customer, I’d recommend adding a button to the email that says “receiving this mail in error, report here.” Make this a simple form that the recipient can fill out, two boxes one for email address and one optional one for “reason”. Once the bank has the report, they can stop the misdirected email and attempt to contact the customer through another channel. I’d also recommend that customers confirm any new address they add to the account in the future.
I know the bank thinks that by requiring an account number they are protecting their customers. Unfortunately, they’re failing to address a rare but potentially harmful case. Sadly, I expect even after this, they will still fail to implement any changes that will stop this from happening in the future.

Who's sharing data

Al has a post asking what people would do if their information was shared after opting out of any sharing.
It’s a tough call and one I think about as I see mail coming to my mailbox to such addresses as laura-sony and laura-quicken and laura-datran. All of these were addresses given to specific companies and where I attempted to opt-out of them sharing my data with other companies. Somewhere along the line, though, the addresses leaked and got into the hands of spammers.
Those addresses are overwhelmed with spams and scams. The frustrating part is there is no way to fix it. Once the addresses are leaked, they’re leaked. They will be receiving spam throughout eternity, even if the companies involved stop selling data or fix their data handling problem.
I don’t know what to do, honestly. If I think it was a one time thing, such as the addresses that started getting spam after the iContact data leak, then I’ll change my address at the vendor and retire the address the spammers have. But with other vendors, I don’t know what happened and I suspect the vendor doesn’t either, and so I can either deal with the spam or hope that I don’t lose real mail from that vendor.
There’s no easy answer. Any time you hand over an email address, or any other form of personal data, you’re trusting in the company, all of their employees and all of their vendors and partners to be honest and competent. This is often not the case.
What do you do?

About that spam suit

John Levine has a longer blog post about the Smith vs. Comcast suit. Be sure to read the comment from Terry Zink about the MS related claims.

Google Buzz

Google Buzz has garnered a lot of attention this week, most of it looking at the privacy implications of requiring users to opt-out of sharing information with anyone who’s ever sent them email.
WARNING: Google Buzz Has a Huge Privacy Flaw
Fugitivus Blog (possibly NSFW due to language)
A dangerous buzz and opt-in isn’t just for email
How Google Buzz just blew your psuedonym
Lifehacker has a number of posts about Google Buzz and how to reset your settings.
I’ve already seen tweets and social media recommending using the networks generated by Google Buzz for marketing purposes.
I’m not very impressed with what I’ve heard about Google Buzz and the total lack of control it gives people over sharing information. I used to be very open with my information online, down to identifying the lab I worked in. I then said something on Usenet that upset someone. That person spent the next 4 months harassing me by phone at work and at home, and even went so far as to dig up my boss’ home number and harass her at home. I’ll be honest it was a scary experience. Even though I knew my stalker was 1500 miles away and extremely unlikely to actually show up on my doorstep, I was still worried for my safety.
That experience made me a lot more cautious about what I share online and how much information I give to people. Google Buzz seems to take a lot of the control of my information away from me. Which is why you won’t find me participating in the Google social network.
UPDATE: And here we go: Win a free laptop by following Hubspot on Google Buzz

Privacy policies in the real world

This weekend we took the car in for service. Instead of dropping it off at the dealership, we found a small, local garage. Prominently positioned on the counter was their Email Privacy Policy.

TWSD: Lying and Hiding

Another installment in my ongoing series: That’s What Spammers Do. In today’s installment we take a look at a company deceiving recipients and hiding their real identity.
One of my disposable addresses has been getting heavily spammed from mylife.com. The subject lines are not just deceptive, they are provably lies. The mail is coming from random domains like urlprotect.com or choosefrequency.com or winnernotice.com advertising links at safetyurl.com or childsafeblogging.com or usakidprotect.com.
The spam all claims someone is “searching for…” at their website. The only thing is, the email address is associated with a fake name I gave while testing a website on behalf of a client. I know what website received the data and I know what other data was provided during the signup process. I also know that the privacy policy at the time said that my data would not be shared and that only the company I gave the information to would be sending me email.
Just more proof that privacy policies aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. But that’s not my real issue here.
The real issue is that I am receiving mail that is clearly deceptive. The subject lines of the emails up until yesterday were “(1) New Message – Someone Searching for You, Find Out…” Yesterday, I actually clicked through one of the messages to confirm that the emails were ending up at mylife.com. After that, the subject lines of the emails changed to “(1) New Person is Searching for You.” I don’t know for sure that my click has caused the change in subject lines, but the timing seems a bit coincidental.
It’s not that someone, somewhere gave mylife.com bad data, or that someone typed a name into the mylife.com search engine and the mylife.com database showed that name and my email address were the same. Neither this name or this email address show up in a google search and I can say with certainty that this is a unique address and name combination given to a specific website. Therefore, the subject lines are clearly and demonstrably lies.
The spams are also coming from different domains and advertising links in different domains. The content is identical, the CAN SPAM addresses are identical. While the court may not rule this is deceptive under the rules of CAN SPAM, it certainly is an attempt to avoid domain level spam filters.
Who are mylife.com? Well, their website and the CAN SPAM address on their spam claims they are the company formerly known as reunion.com. I’ve talked about reunion.com here before. They have a history of harvesting addresses from users address books. They were sued for deceptive email practices under California law, but won the case just recently. They seem to think that the court case was permission to send deceptive email and have thus ramped up their deceptive practices.
If you are a legitimate email marketer, there are a couple take home messages here.
1) Spammers send mail with different domains, from different IP addresses, that contain identical content, landing pages and CAN SPAM addresses. Legitimate marketers should not rotate content and sends through different domains or different IP addresses. Pick your domain, pick your IP and stick with it.
1a) Spammers use randomly chosen domain names and cycle through domains frequently. Legitimate marketers must not use unrelated domains in marketing. Use a domain name that relates to your product, your industry or you.
2) Spammers send mail with deceptive subject lines. Legitimate marketers should make sure their subject lines are clear and truthful.
3) Spammers send mail in violation of the privacy policy under which information was collected. Legitimate marketers should be very careful to handle data in accordance with their privacy policies.
That’s what spammers do. Is that what you do?

e360 sues a vendor

As if suing themselves out of business by going after Comcast and Spamhaus weren’t enough, e360 is now suing Choicepoint for breach of contract and CAN SPAM violations. As usual, Mickey has all the documents (complaint and answer) up at SpamSuite.
This may actually be an interesting case. On the surface it is a contractual dispute. Choicepoint sold e360 40,000,000 data records containing contact information including email addresses, snail mail addresses and phone numbers. Some of the records were marked “I” meaning they could be used for email. Some of the records were marked “O” meaning they could not be used for email.
Despite these terms being reasonably well defined in the contract, e360 sent email to addresses in records marked “O.” Some of those addresses resulted in e360 being sued by recipients. During the course of the suit, e360 contacted Choicepoint and asked for indemnification. Choicepoint refused for a number of reasons, including the fact that Choicepoint told e360 the addresses were not for mailing. In response, e360 filed suit.
The interesting and relevant part of this case is the CAN SPAM violation that e360 alleges.