Tips about eMail Tracker Programs

The man that sent this information is a computer tech. He spends a lot of time clearing the junk off computers for people and listens to complaints about speed.  All forwards are not bad, just some.

He wrote:
 
By now, I suspect everyone is familiar with snopes.com and/or truthorfiction.com for determining whether information received via email is just that:  true/false or fact/fiction. Both are excellent sites.
 

Advice from snopes.com   VERY IMPORTANT!

1)Any time you see an email that says “forward this on to ‘10’ (or however many) of your friends,” “sign this petition,” or “you'll get bad luck” or “you’ll get good luck” or “you’ll see something funny on your screen after you send it” or whatever, it almost always has an email tracker program that tracks the cookies and emails of those folks you forward to. The host sender is getting a copy each time it gets forwarded and then is able to get lists of ‘active’ email addresses to use in SPAM emails or sell to other spammers. Even when you get emails that demand you send the email on if you're not ashamed of God/Jesus—that is email tracking, and they are playing on our conscience. These people don’t care how they get your email addresses—just as long as they get them. Also, emails that talk about a missing child or a child with an incurable disease, e.g., “how would you feel if that was your child” are email tracking. Ignore them and don't participate!
 

2)Almost all emails that ask you to add your name and forward on to others are similar to that mass letter years ago that asked people to send business cards to the little kid in Florida who wanted to break the Guinness Book of Records for the most cards. All it was, and all any of this type of email is, is a way to get names and ‘cookie’ tracking information for telemarketers and spammers—to validate active email accounts for their own profitable purposes.

You can do your friends and family members a GREAT favor by sending the information in this article to them. You will be providing a service to your friends. And you will be rewarded by not getting thousands of spam emails in the future!

Do yourself a favor and STOP adding your name(s) to those types of listings regardless how inviting they might sound! Or make you feel guilty if you don’t! It’s all about getting email addresses and nothing more. You may think you are supporting a GREAT cause, but you are NOT!
 

Instead, you will be getting tons of junk mail later and very possibly a virus. Plus, we are helping the spammers get rich! Let's not make it easy for them!
 

Another thing, email petitions are NOT acceptable to Congress or any other organization, i.e. social security, etc. To be acceptable, petitions must have a “signed signature” and full address of the person signing the petition, so this is a waste of time and you are just helping the email trackers.
 

Tips for Handling Telemarketers

Three Little Words That Work!

1) The three little words are: ‘Hold On, Please...’

Saying this, while putting down your phone and walking off (instead of hanging-up immediately) would make each telemarketing call so much more time-consuming that boiler room sales would grind to a halt.
 

Then when you eventually hear the phone company’s ‘beep-beep-beep’ tone, you know it’s time to go back and hang up your handset, which has efficiently completed its task.
 

These three little words will help eliminate telephone soliciting.

2)Do you ever get those annoying phone calls with no one on the other end?

This is a telemarketing technique where a machine makes phone calls and records the time of day when a person answers the phone.


This technique is used to determine the best time of day for a ‘real’ sales person to call back and get someone at home.


What you can do after answering, if you notice there is no one there, is to immediately start hitting your # button on the phone, 6 or 7 times as quickly as possible. This confuses the machine that dialed the call and it kicks your number out of their system. Gosh, what a shame not to have your name in their system any longer!

3)Junk Mail Help: When you get ‘ads’ enclosed with your phone or utility bill, return them with your payment. Let the sending companies throw their own junk mail away.

When you get those ‘pre-approved’ letters in the mail for everything from credit cards to second mortgages and similar type junk, do not throw away the return envelope.
 

Most of these come with postage-paid return envelopes, right? It costs them more than the regular

44 cents postage when they receive them back.
 

It costs them nothing if you throw them away! The postage was around 50 cents before the last increase and it is according to the weight. In that case, why not get rid of some of your other junk mail and put it in these cool little, postage-paid return envelopes?
 

One of journalist Andy Rooney’s ideas:

Send an ad for your local chimney cleaner to American Express. Send a pizza coupon to Citibank. If you didn't get anything else that day, then just send them their blank application back! If you want to remain anonymous, just make sure your name isn't on anything you send them.
 

You can even send the envelope back empty if you want to just to keep them guessing! It still costs them 44 cents.
 

The banks and credit card companies are currently getting a lot of their own junk back in the mail, but folks, we need to OVERWHELM them. Let's let them know what it's like to get lots of junk mail, and best of all they're paying for it. Twice!
 

Let’s help keep our postal service busy since they are saying that email is cutting into their business profits, and that’s why they need to increase postage costs again. You get the idea!


If enough people follow these tips, it will work. I have been doing this for years and I get very little junk mail anymore.

The following tips on protecting your data privacy are from the Windows Secrets Newsletter Issue 279 • 2011-03-03. Go to their website for a free subscription.

Ten tips for data privacy

Here are tips for how to protect your personal information.

1. Use unique Forgot your password? questions: One of the most frequent ways hackers break into the social networking accounts of celebrities and public figures is by clicking the Forgot your password? link on the signin page. The site verifies the person's identity by posing questions that can easily be answered about most people with a simple Web search: Where did you go to high school? What is your father's middle name? Whenever you can, write your own custom password questions that have answers no one could easily find. If you have to use default questions, make up more-secure answers — just make sure you can remember them.

2. Protect your friends: Don't let social-networking services scan your e-mail address book. When you sign up for a new social network, it often offers to save you time by scanning your address book to see whether your contacts are already on the network. Some sites then send e-mail messages to everyone in your contact list — or to everyone you've ever sent an e-mail message — without warning you that they're going to do it.
   

3. Check privacy policies: Before you provide any data to a website, read its privacy policy. The policy must clearly explain what data the website gathers about you; how it is used, shared, and secured; and how you can edit or delete it. If the site doesn't have a privacy policy, don't use it.
   

4. Don't post your location: GPS-based services such as Foursquare can now automatically post the location of your cell phone when you "check in" at a business or restaurant. Disable the location feature on your cell phone, and don't post your location on your social-networking site. Wait to post holiday pictures until you're back at home. When you reveal online that you are away from home and your residence is unoccupied, you can never be sure who's reading.
   

5. Use privacy settings: If you use a social-networking site, thoroughly investigate its privacy options and lock down your accounts as tightly as you can. Share only with people you have met in person.
   

6. Monitor your online presence: Search for your name on the Internet. Use at least two search engines, such as Bing and Google. Search for text and images. If you find sensitive information about yourself on a website, look for contact information on the website and send a request to have your information removed.
   

7. Approach links with caution: Treat e-mail messages and IMs on social-networking sites with caution, and don't click links inside them unless you know that the person who appears to have sent them actually did. Keep an eye out for generic language that could be from anyone or to anyone. For example, the message "What are you doing in this video?" might very well be a social-engineering scam, whereas "Here's a video I took in 2003 when we were traveling in Maui in Chris's blue VW campervan" is probably not. If you have any doubt at all, confirm with your friend through an alternate means before you click any links.
   

8. Do your banking and bill-paying at home, and bookmark the URLs: Never enter confidential personal information, such as your Social Security number or credit-card numbers, into a website using a public Wi-Fi system or public computer. Save transactions for your home computer, and make sure you use a bookmark link to open websites for your bank or e-commerce sites. Never access your bank, credit-card, or online-shopping sites from links in e-mail. It's easy for criminals to send fake e-mails from spoofed e-mail addresses, create fake sites that look like the real thing, and then harvest your information for the black market.
   

9. Shop only at encrypted sites: Before you enter a credit-card number on a shopping site, check the URL to make sure the site is secure. This site should use a URL that starts with https instead of the more-common http. The s is for secure: if it's not there, don't enter your information.
   

10. Keep your computer safe: According to the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report, the single leading cause of data loss continues to be loss of computer hardware. Laptops and other mobile devices get stolen from cafés, airports, public transportation, and almost any other place travelers are likely to be found. If you travel with a computer, treat it like your wallet — it probably has more in it!