Dear GMG Friends,
Have you ever received a mass email sent to dozens of addresses, with your email address in the To or CC field? Maybe that email was sent to a group of people you know, or maybe it was sent to a group of strangers.
How did you feel about your email address being shared with everyone else? Maybe you were upset, or maybe you never thought about it. I’d like to tell you why this is a privacy issue you should care about, and what you can do about it.
The Threats
When a person receives an email that has multiple email addresses in the To or CC field, they can see everyone the email was sent to. Why does that matter? Most people won’t do anything with those addresses.
Well, some people might be curious, or nosy, and look into who received the email. They may even do some online snooping to find details about the other recipients on social media or elsewhere online. In rare cases, someone may target one of the other recipients in the form of harassing, threatening, hacking, or scamming.
A malicious person doesn’t need to move against the owner of the email address right away; they can save the email address to target at any point in the future.
It’s not only humans who can act against the owners of the revealed email addresses. Malware can search a computer or mobile device for email addresses. When it finds an email with a long list of addresses in the To or CC fields, it can harvest them. It can then send spam or malicious emails to those addresses, or save those addresses to be the target of hacking, scamming, identity theft, etc.
Unfortunately, the revealed email addresses don’t necessarily stop with the recipients. Any one of the recipients can forward the email, and the email addresses of all the other recipients will be forwarded along with the email. I’ve been forwarded many emails that include long lists of email addresses, some of which appear to be internal company addresses which aren’t intended for use outside the company.
Since mass communication started last year due to more members, I've been searching for a solution to allow us to communicate safely without the risk of invading privacy and security. As one of the solutions, I created communication menus on our Website (Your Voice, Communications, and Blog) but they have not been very popular probably because we feel more connected when we send an email to friends directly, however it's creating security and privacy issues.
To communicate with GMG Friends at mygmg.org
We have have three GMG options for communication - "Your Voice" , "Communications", and "Blog" (those three are very similar and eventually we will pick the one most used.)
Your Voice is easiest to use and you don't need access rights. You can just write anything you want and other people can reply. When someone replies to your comment, you receive a notification.
Communications: this has categories such as musicales, concerts, friends, etc. so you can write in a specific topic. You need to login like you do to sign up on musicales. When someone replies to you, you receive a notification.
Blog: This is very much like Facebook. When you post your comments, all the GMG members who subscribed receive notification. You can comment on any of the posting, but if you want to initiate a new post, you need permission. (Please let me know if you want permission)
GMG Facebook https://www.facebook.comt/mygmg.org/
Please let me know if you have any questions.
I wish we can meet in person and resume musicales again!
Cheers,
Utako