{"id":1023,"date":"2009-05-11T12:16:13","date_gmt":"2009-05-11T02:16:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=1023"},"modified":"2010-05-17T00:18:32","modified_gmt":"2010-05-16T14:18:32","slug":"emailmenot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2009\/05\/11\/emailmenot\/","title":{"rendered":"EmailMeNot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There is a constant tension between the web-site owners who want to harvest your email address for marketing and the web-users who want to access content without the bother.<\/p>\n<p>Arguably, there is a (social) contract where you are purchasing the information on the web-site in return for providing permission to receive marketing emails.<\/p>\n<p>However, as someone who fast-forwards through the adverts when watching recorded television, you can guess where I stand on this.<\/p>\n<div class=\"aside\">That last sentence is ambiguous and has an inconsistent subject, but, as someone who is hastily posting his first article in ages, you can guess where I stand on this.<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.bugmenot.com\/\">BugMeNot<\/a> provides one element of the arms race between the reader and the writer. It encourages people to share registration details.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s fine for a read-only service, but what if you want, for example, the wiki site to record your edits under your handle but not email you newsletters?<\/p>\n<p>I propose a new service, EmailMeNot (just a placeholder name).<\/p>\n<p>Register at a new site with your name and password, but instead of your email address use <code>someUniqueGibberishString @ emailmenot.com<\/code>.<\/p>\n<p>There an automated rule will look for a registration link, and open it automatically. All other email to that address will be discarded.<\/p>\n<p>Security risks include that you are beholden to the emailmenot.com owners not to take over your account whenever they want.<\/p>\n<p>Defeating this system will be trivial to web-masters to do &#8211; simply request the password to be re-entered when the link is followed &#8211; but it will get you past a lot of registered web-sites now.<\/p>\n<p>Given two major downsides, I can&#8217;t see myself ever implementing this, but if someone else wants to&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"aside\">I have deliberately not searched to see if someone else has already implemented this. I can&#8217;t see the joy at the service being available outweighing my disappointment at being gazumped.<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There is a constant tension between the web-site owners who want to harvest your email address for marketing and the web-users who want to access content without the bother.<\/p>\n<p>As someone who fast-forwards through the adverts when watching recorded television, you can guess where I stand on this.<\/p>\n<p>I propose a new service, EmailMeNot.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1023","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-thoughts-from-the-shower"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1023","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1023"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1023\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1233,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1023\/revisions\/1233"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1023"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1023"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1023"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}