giving out your email address

Hi Rick,

Well, only so much as whatever information you gave to those email systems when you signed up. Whatever you told them is most likely on file and could be tied back under certain circumstances...

For example, if you give a forum like this your email address, we can not find out anything about you. Yahoo (or any other service) is not going to tell us anything about you, no matter how much they know or whatever we ask.

But, if you were somehow involved in a serious crime on the Internet and left your email address behind, then the appropriate authorities (which will differ country to country of course) may very well be able to officially contact one of those email providers and get whatever information they have about you - legally. (Obviously, a lot depends upon what we're talking about, how serious it is, etc. Also, the information would again be limited to exactly what Yahoo or whoever really knows. If they don't have the information, they can't give it out.)

I'm not sure I quite understand this question? If you don't want information available (at the email company, for example), the only way to prevent it is to not give them the information in the first place.

Please feel free to explain more about what concerns you have, and we can discuss them.

Best Wishes,
LowWaterMark

 

Yes, good point rerun. People often don't realize just how much personal information they give out mainly because they aren't giving it out all in a single place and all at once.

If a person uses the same nickname at multiple places on the web, (such as forums like this), and use the same email address, perhaps even posting it publicly for all to see, then someone else could "connect the dots" and develop quite a collection of information.

But to carry the original question beyond just the "email address" itself and what the email provider might know, there's also the person's IP address connected with posts on forums, email messages sent directly from their machines, and so on.

Almost everyone gets their IP address from an ISP that they pay for Internet access. Those ISPs almost always have significant information about their users for billing purposes. "Connecting the dots" again, a person uses their own IP address on a web site, where they also leave their email address, even if the email address is anonymous, very often the IP address is not. (Yes, anonymous proxies could be used, but at this point we're speaking about the basic question of can a person be identified? And most people don't use proxies anyway.)

The Internet is not private at all. Privacy on the Internet is mostly an illusion simply because people are often in the privacy of their own room, with no one physically looking over their shoulder. But when you use a technology as complex as this, passing through telephone or cable services (that you are clearly identified to), out to ISPs (where you are also ID and billed), through email providers and to web sites, all of whom log most everything.... No, there's no privacy here.

There are things you can do, but you'll never be 100% private when you use someone else's technology.