Bust the sites that sell your info when you sign up for a new account

In a world where privacy is a concern but still gets sold to the highest bidder, it would be nice to know which sites actually sell your info to 3rd parties, so you know why you get bombarded with spam!

There's a cool gmail trick that you can do to keep track of what sites sold your info when signing up:

head over to any website that allows you to create a new account, for demonstration purposes I’ll just use pinterest.com although this post is not yet sponsored by them ;)

all you got to do is to add any word before the “@gmail.com”

in layman’s terms : the idea is to append any word to the end of your email before the @ sign.

e.g: lets say your email is :

yourEmail@gmail.com

and when signing up for pinterest, you provide the website the following email :

yourEmail+pinterest@gmail.com

so the basic syntax for any website would be :

yourEmail+websitename@gmail.com

and as expected we get an email to the new email address specific to the website to our inbox.

my email was a bit long , so i used myEmail+pint@gmail.com :)

and if the website sold your info to a 3rd party, in this case, if pinterest sold your data to a 3rd party, you’ll get the spam email addressed to

yourEmail+pinterest@gmail.com

If it would make much of a difference is up to you, but with this you’d at-least know where your data goes :)

You can do this trick with email provider, even if its outlook or a custom organization domain email :)

Follow me on medium for more cool content and to help the algorithm from here >> Hasanka Amarasinghe << :)