Congratulations to Kathleen Kelly! Kathleen is the prize winner of the $25 Amazon gift card presented by Valerie Webster, author of Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller. The gift card was awarded as part of Ms. Webster’s recent book tour through Partners In Crime Virtual Book Tours.
Another security update from valeriewebster.com to help keep you and your information safe.
What is the security issue? Companies and online sites (Facebook and Twitter, for example) place a miniscule image pixel in your emails that detect the exact time and date you open your email and report back on whether you looked at it, as well as your location and the time of day, even how many times you go back and open that message.
Those tracking emails contain an embedded line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1×1 pixel image, so tiny it’s invisible. And it’s not just companies hoping to sell to you or predict behavior patterns. Scammers, business partners and competitors, even your spouse can employ one of the currently available email tracking software packages.
There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company that also builds anti-tracking tools. Google trackers are present on 82% of all web traffic. Also according to OMC’s data, a full 19 percent of all “conversational” email is now tracked. That’s one in five of the emails you get from your friends.
Research from October looked at emails from newsletter and mailing list services from the 14,000 most popular websites on the web, and found that 85 percent contained trackers—and 30 percent leak your email addresses to outside corporations, without your consent.
Do the big-name email services offer any help? Gmail retired its practice of reading your emails for targeted ads in 2017. Outlook has never tracked but features like auto-filled calendar events, as well as spam and scam protection, still depend on scanning incoming mail. Because Google, Microsoft and Yahoo don’t encrypt your mail end-to-end, it’s tough to know for sure how much of it they access, privacy experts say. Unless your email provider is end-to-end encrypted, there’s nothing stopping that provider from accessing your mail.
So how do you protect yourself and your information? The following will give you some tools to upgrade your email protection.
It’s easy to assume that what we send and receive in our email accounts stays private. But email is a perfect environment for tracking and big providers do little to stop it. Your information is just too valuable for trackers to ignore. They use it to boost sales. They sell it at significant prices. Forget self-regulation. It’s up to you and me maintain our own privacy.
I hope you have found this information useful. I will be posting at least one up-to-the-minute security article a month on https://bit.ly/3chtdST. Feel free to let me know what you think of these updates at valeriewebster@valeriewebster.com.
A Long Island, New York grandmother is being hailed for setting up and helping capture a suspected scammer in a trap that was all caught on video.
The 73-year-old former 911 dispatcher Jean Ebbert received an odd call this week from a man claiming to be her grandson who was in jail for DUI and needed bail.
Ebbert eventually spoke to another man on the phone who claimed to be her grandson’s lawyer and asked to come to the house to collect the bail money. He claimed he needed $8,000 to post the grandson’s bail. Jean told the man to come to the house to pick up the money but also called the police to wait for the man when he arrived.
When the man showed up at Jean’s house, she handed him an empty envelope full of paper towels before officers swarmed him in an exchange that was captured on her doorbell camera.
Partners In Crime is managing the Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller virtual tour with a month long series of reviews. You’ll get the straight skinny on the book and reader reactions. PLUS! If you sign up, you’ll have an opportunity to win a $25 Amazon gift card. Sign up now! https://bit.ly/3K4NKtu You’ll see where Rita will gets reviewed and you have a chance to participate.
Diane Banti of Lake Wales, FL! Our December Quiz winner of the $25 Amazon gift card. You can be our next winner.
Sign up on our site and answer this month’s crime fiction quiz question. Once you sign up, you are eligible every month your name remains on the list. Get on the list and give yourself a shot. https://valeriewebster.com/do-you-know
Valerie Webster and Driven: A Rita Mars Thriller in the spotlight via Author of the Day interview.
