Imagine you hire a dog-walker so they can walk your dog while you’re at work. While you may be leery about trusting the business, the simple convenience of this service warrants the risk. So you give them your house key with the best of intentions.
Now imagine that a few weeks later, you learn that while the dog-walker has dutifully taken care of your dog, he also made a dozen copies of the key and gave them to some of his friends. If the friends simply watch Game of Thrones on your TV while you’re gone, it’s a breach of privacy but mostly just an annoyance. But if their intentions are more nefarious—stealing things from your home, selling them, and sharing the profit with your dog-walker—the situation becomes far worse than just a petty annoyance. You’re actually paying someone to steal from you.
Naturally, this is a metaphor. The dog-walker is an online service such as a bank, credit card company, mortgager, or ecommerce site. The house key is your email address. The friends are marketing partners, affiliates, and third parties, who buy your information from the online service. And the stolen items are something far worse than trinkets or collectibles around your house. They’re your network security, your identity, the health of your hardware, your contacts list and address book, and your personal, confidential data.
The same as switching the locks on your doors, if you provide an online service with your master key, it takes time and money to regain the privacy and security you had before the breach. Damage by spyware, viruses, and malicious code may cost a fortune and take weeks, even months, to remove. And once your confidential data is stolen, it’s nearly impossible to make it private again.
Learn exactly who sold your email address.
With Bulc Club, you never give anyone your email address. Our members have an unlimited number of forwarders they provide individually to each online service. This is akin to giving the mailman a key that only permits access to a mailbox, a dog-walker a key that only permits access to the yard, and a meter reader a key that only permits access to a gas meter. If trust is broken and a breach occurs, the locks can be changed instantly and individually and—other than the minor frustration of having to find a new dog-walker—no damage is done. Additionally, with uniqueness of these forwarders, you learn exactly who shared your key in the first place.
Provide your email address to FreelancerMap, and they’ll sell it to everyone.
Bulc Club prepends message subjects with the name of the forwarder (e.g., InstantCheckmate) so you can identify who sold your information and easily disable the forwarder.
Our club members, to date, have identified, rated, and blocked tens of thousands of services like these. Each sender’s email address was originally sold by an online service they trusted. And because all members benefit from each individual’s ratings, we’re quickly eradicating the world of corrupt dog-walkers and on our way to make identity theft a thing of the past.
Join us in our mission to rid the world of spam, forever. We’d love your help.