I use dummy anonymous forwarding email addresses (e.g. like
Blur) to register on those sites that insist that you register before you can access whatever you find of interest there. I use the dummy email address where I do not wish to risk opening my personal mailbox ID to potential spam from such sites (they pretty much all do it, which is why they want your email address in the first place - it's a numbers game for them).
One of the organisations I subscribe to is
FEE.org, which describes itself as:
Foundation for Economic Education
fee.org
The Foundation for Economic Education "is a non-political, non-profit, tax-exempt educational foundation" dedicated to the "economic, ethical and legal principles of a free society." FEE publishes books and hosts seminars and lectures.More at Wikipedia
Founder: Leonard E. Read
Type: Educational foundation, IRS 501(c)(3) tax exempt
Tax ID no.: 136006960
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So, today I got an email in my inbox addressed to one of my dummy email addresses, from FEE, and it had an item that looked like it could be an interesting article, and I carelessly clicked on the link without thinking.
Normally I would have copied the URL from the link and truncated all the tracking stuff off first, and then gone to look at that article.
What happened then surprised and pleased me though -
BAJ popped up this huge red warning screen - text copied below, but minus the actual link ID, just something similar:
STOP. HOLD UP!
The site ahead contains Privacy.
Attackers currently on
http://fee.us13.list-manage.com/track/click?u=af44b8bfb54164e733a00a887&id=f0627f35bc&e=23fdfe0dcf
might attempt to install dangerous programs on your computer that steal or delete your information (for example, photos, passwords, messages, and credit cards).
Action taken because of the following filter
||list-manage.com/track/
Found in:
EasyPrivacy
How would you like to proceed?
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I followed the URL (minus the click-tracking) and was re-routed to this "About" at
Mailchimp.com______
/ ___M ]__
C{ ( o o )}
{ ••
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You probably found this page because one of our subscribers used MailChimp to send you an email campaign, and you traced a link in the email back here to investigate. MailChimp is an email-marketing service that serves more than 15 million companies of all shapes and sizes, from all over the world. We send more than 1 billion emails every day, and we help our customers comply with spam laws and best practices so they can get their campaigns into their subscribers' inboxes.
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Love What You Do
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I was
surprised because, though I had read the blurb about BAJ
before installing the chrome add-on, it had not sunk in that that BAJ would be able to monitor dodgy clicks like this from my emails. I was
pleased that it did this, as it is very easy to be careless when clicking links, and
sometimes that's all it takes to get a malware attack. I am therefore going to install this chrome add-on on all PCs I manage or help others with, as a matter of course.
By the way,
before anyone jumps down my throat for subscribing to FEE, I do realise that, despite its self-declared
"non-political" (ha-ha) status, FEE.org seems to have a decided political bias (seems to be anti-Trump or something from what I have seen so far) and, given its supposed emphasis on economics, it talks about political issues far too much and thereby contradicts itself - which is not a good look. Furthermore, given its stated emphasis on "educating" the young, I would see FEE.org as potentially having been cynically set up as a propaganda machine targeted at susceptible young minds for a particular brand of religio-political ideology ("catch 'em young", as the RC church used to put it). I don't know/care much who funds it, but "follow the money" might be interesting if I had the inclination (which I don't).
I subscribed to the website not because I particularly liked its religio-political bias (
I couldn't care less, actually), but simply because I saw that some of its economic arguments looked interesting and I wanted to follow them up, because some of their lectures might be of use for my daughter (who is studying economics), and who is in their target audience age demographic. It's a bit like the parson's egg - "good in parts". She would be able to read/watch it and learn
despite any political bias, as she starts from the premise that all teachers are to be regarded as potential idiots until they show themselves otherwise, and is learning to quietly spot an invalid/biased argument or propaganda item a mile off. So this would be good practice for her and she would be able to establish for herself whether the website might be able to contribute to her economics syllabus, regardless of any bias/noise in the signal. Let's face it, bias abounds in most human communication and affairs. (Interesting side reference here -
BIAS.)
So
BAJ looks like it will protect one from being quite so easily susceptible to evil click-tracking...
...but you're on your own when it comes to protection from bias.
(I actually consider that we should welcome bias in a communication anyway, because it tells one an awful lot about the level of objective content of the message and the rationale used in communicating it.)
