Can you spot the spam?
Posted by Hannah Rosenbaum on August 15, 2006 09:50 AM
Are you spam savvy? Can you tell which Web sites will respect your personal information? Can you tell which ones might sell or rent your e-mail address to spammy third parties? Take our Spam Quiz to find out if you can spot a spammy Web site before your inbox suffers the consequences.
Similar to our Spyware Quiz which revealed that users have an extremely difficult time distinguishing between safe sites and sites littered with spyware, our Spam Quiz sets out to determine whether users can tell which sites employ unsafe e-mail practices. The quiz asks users to judge the e-mail practices of sites in popular categories (free games, e-cards, sweepstakes, credit cards, scholarships, online dating, jokes, and petitions) that often request user e-mail addresses.
The stakes for failing the quiz are high. Registering with all eight of the quizzes' unsafe sites resulted in 2,697 e-mails per week in SiteAdvisor's test inboxes. That's 140,244 e-mails per year! Signing up at the worst site in the quiz resulted in 1,075 e-mails per week and the average unsafe sign-up resulted in 337 e-mails per week. The vast majority of e-mails received contained highly commercial content from third parties.
It's difficult to judge whether or not a site is trustworthy. It's also hard to determine which Web sites are responsible for the spammy e-mails users ultimately receive. Sites often share e-mail addresses with third parties, so the spammy e-mail senders may be entirely different from the sites where a user submitted an e-mail address. SiteAdvisor tests a Web site's e-mail practices by using a unique, one-time-use e-mail address for each submission. Any e-mail that arrives in this unique inbox can therefore be tracked back to the Web site where the e-mail address was originally submitted.
In response to the torrent of spam over the years, many users no longer register for anything outside of their Citibank-eBay-Amazon comfort zone. Others create throw away accounts using Webmail providers like Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail. But we believe that users shouldn't have to limit their online activities for fear of receiving spam. As our tests show, there are many sites that DO respect e-mail privacy. Users just need to know which ones. With the availability of McAfee SiteAdvisor, easy to understand, useful information about each site you visit (how many e-mails received, what types) is now freely available.
Do you know which sites you can trust with your e-mail address? Take our Spam Quiz and find out.
Comments
These quizzes are interesting and helpful, thanks. Overall, I think they would be considerably more helpful, however, if you offered an analysis of the privacy policies to point out to users what it is exactly that they should look for when evaluating them. It's not always obvious.
Posted by: eszter | August 19, 2006 07:08 AM