Changing Your Email Tells Them Who You Became
The two earlier posts in this series – The Cookie That Never Expires and What 1,500 Emails Reveal About Tracking – described how a hashed email address became the ad industry’s favorite way to connect you across companies, and then showed that happening in one person’s real mail. This post looks at the same problem from the other side: what happens when you try to get out from under it.
You switch to an email aliasing service. Over the next few weeks you work through every account you have and swap the old address for a fresh alias – the bank, the airline, the pharmacy, the streaming service, fifty places in all. It feels like real work, and it is. When you finish, you feel unlinked: the old address is retired, the new ones are scattered across dozens of services, and nothing ties them together but a list only you can see.