this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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A self-proclaimed data enthusiast calling themselves ‘ThinkingOne’ has made a huge database containing 201 million pieces of user data from X freely available. The data is said to have come from two previous leaks and includes email addresses, locations and profile data of users of the social media platform.

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[–] max_dryzen@mander.xyz 1 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (1 children)

wouldn't profilers simply track via the domain tld instead of the whole address...shopping1 at uniquedomain, bank2 at uniquedomain , etc

and in the case of aliasing, couldnt a domain provider tell where the aliases rout to and sell that info as a side earner?

[–] CatZoomies@lemmy.world 1 points 21 hours ago

Great questions! Seriously, those made me think for sure.

For question one, I suppose a profiler could do that. If my domain name is myemaildomain.com, they probably could track all emails and sell it collectively. But I don’t think corporations do that at this time. That would be akin to profiling all Hotmail, Gmail, Live, etc emails, appreciating those are massive services. I suppose if nefarious actors were to do that to my domain, I could consider switching domains - I have multiple domain names I own, and it’d be trivial to use the other ones. In the years I’ve been using a custom domain for email, I haven’t encountered any nefarious actors and have significantly eliminated any spam.

For question two, the domain provider I use doesn’t do that in their terms of service. However, if they did look at my MX records and decided they wanted to profile me as a user of Addy, they definitely could do that. Though it would hurt their business as many users would migrate their domains to new registrars - I certainly would move my domains to a new registrar!