Besides cookies, that’s why everyone wants our email address
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Thinking about it, we treat email really badly. We share it everywhere, we use it for any service or platform, from the supermarket to streaming, from delivery to collecting points. And even the shrewdness (in vogue above all a few years ago) of using some of them for certain purposes and others for official matters has faded a bit over time.
This is a serious mistake, because the e-mail address, which by its nature is public as it was designed for interpersonal communications, still deserves some privacy and a more discreet diffusion. It remains a basic and increasingly precious personal element.
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From cookies to the email address
The email address, remember Brian X. Chen in a curious insight into the New York Times, is not only used to contact us: for those involved in online advertising, for publishers and for app developers and producers, it is a recurring indication for following us online and offering us targeted advertising depending on where we surf. It happens due to the progressive reduction in weight and functionality related to so-called cookies, simple pieces of code that for years have carried out this under-the-counter digital profiling job and which now have a much more complex life. In short, they are much less useful to profile us and offer us targeted advertising. Not to mention that they are substantially irrelevant in most of the new digital channels, from connected TVs to the same applications for smartphones and tablets.
The email, demanded with increasing insistence and frequency, is one of the most basic alternative channels. And it is indeed much more useful not only than cookies but also other personal information: “I can take your email address and find data that you may not have even realized you have given to a certain brand – he explained Michael Priem, CEO of Modern Impacta Minneapolis advertising firm, on the NYT – The amount of data available about us as consumers is literally shocking.”
What is Unified ID 2.0
The email address is therefore essential to implement others tracking systems that have replaced cookies and trackers over time (and which created our fingerprint) as Unified ID 2.0, or UID 2.0, developed by Trade Desk, a Californian company leader in the support of so-called programmatic advertising and already a partner of many giants, from P&G and Disney to Amazon Web Services. The system transforms the e-mail, granted perhaps in exchange for a small discount on a site or subscription to a newsletter, into an information element, an anonymised alphanumeric string which is however associated with any other service that uses UID 2.0. This also happens with phone numbers. So advertisers, media centers and online advertisers are allowed to follow the user between the various platforms (from a shopping spree to a streaming service, for example) by selecting the most effective and relevant ads. No meal is free, after all, not even on the Internet. Indeed, especially on the Internet.
Other ways to use e-mail
And if Mozilla finds UID 2.0 “a massive step backwards” for privacy, we are too simpler systems to use an email address. Trivially, it could contain name and surname and a site or an app could load them into the database of an advertising broker to attempt a match with profiles that may already be present and containing such a number of data as to be able to offer more targeted advertising than generic ones. In short: if one wonders why, despite all the refusals to use cookies and the utmost attention to block app tracking, advertising is still invasive and incredibly profiled, it’s because our email is still circulating too much. And in some cases, or for some jobs, nothing can be done about it. Or maybe yes.
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How to regain some privacy
For example, you can go back to old habits and create one email for each service, so as to use it only for that specific platform, at least for the most important and most often used, from Netflix to Amazon passing through the most popular apps. But it is certainly a complex and boring job.
You can then use the services that some groups like Apple or Mozilla, they offer to disguise the mail address with a set of alias addresses that forward messages to the real one. Mozilla offers 5 free email aliases, good for the phone too, col Firefox Relay service (and asks 99 cents a month for each additional alias), while Apple offers the option with the Hide my email feature integrated in Sign in with Apple and iCloud Plusits paid cloud subscription service.
Then we must not forget to exclude your email, when possible, from use with systems such as UID 2.0 (in this case you can do it online). Or you can do nothing: for many, targeted and relevant advertising is useful, privacy concerns are not so burning, and therefore they can continue to share the email without problems. Even in these cases, it’s still at least worth creating a couple alternatives for the more aggressive commercial services, i loyalty programs of brand chains such as i supermarkets or the newsletters not informative.
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