Can people track my email address location?
Hi, everyone, I'm Leo Notenboom for askleo.com,
where we've been talking about email and email addresses and privacy since 2003.
Here's today's question.
"I was on a dating site and I received a message from a lady and she gave me her
email address so we could talk privately in which I emailed her back.
Now that she knows my email address,
can anything bad or dangerous happen like a virus or having my account cleaned out?
Can she track my email address location?
My email is with Google."
So it depends a lot on your level of security savvy, I'll call it,
and how you've used that email address in the past.
For example, you could have just given your email address to a spammer,
but unfortunately, there are worse things that could happen.
This is a situation that calls for what I
often refer to as a throwaway email address.
Whenever you're not sure,
whenever you are concerned about exactly the kinds of things you're concerned about
before you give someone your email address, make a new account,
make a new free account at any of the free services Yahoo!
Gmail Outlook.com doesn't really matter which one.
You won't be using this for a very long time.
It's a very short
email account lifespan to be used while you basically determine whether or not
the person you're communicating with is to be trusted.
So next time
when you find yourself in a situation like this, that's the thing to do first.
Now, since you've already gone that far,
here are the things that you might run into.
Spam, of course, is the most obvious one.
It's an odd way to collect spam email addresses, but it could happen.
The person that you gave your email address to simply by responding to your
email, might actually start sending you spam,
might have your email address handed over to a spammer.
It's not particularly likely,
but it's a possibility and it's probably the most benign.
Another thing, of course, is privacy.
Now,
if you just search for your email address
now, unfortunately, the way that Google and Bing search work
is that they actually don't treat your email address as a unique token.
They actually ignore the @
and the period that are probably in your email address somewhere.
Fortunately, Duck Duck Go will allow you
to search for your email address, make sure to put it in quotes so I might
put in, "leo@askleo.com", and search for that, see what turns up.
And remember that whoever you just gave your email address to could do exactly
the same search and they can turn up exactly the same information.
So if you've been posting things publicly,
say, on social media, for example, or discussion forums or whatever,
that also happens to include your location and other personal information
that's easily findable, too, by anybody that has your email address.
That's one of the reasons we strongly
advise to be careful about where you put sensitive or private information.
It's easy to search and of course, people do.
Now, the location is something you asked about specifically.
And the good news here is that, no, your location is not associated with your
email address, at least not by the providers of your email service.
So in your case, Google won't tell somebody where you live.
You know, Microsoft won't tell somebody
where an Outlook.com address comes from, that kind of thing.
However, in this kind of dovetails
with what I just talked about with respect to search,
if you have anywhere published both your email address and your location
in the same place that is publicly accessible, anybody can find it.
Social media profiles are one of the common scenarios,
but there are others, including, of all things, public records.
Your government often has public records
that of late often have your email address associated with them.
Whether or not this is entirely in your control is unclear,
but it's at least something else you should be aware of to understand exactly
what can and cannot happen when someone has your email address.
You also asked about malware, and this is a case where the.
The answer is no, no,
you're not going to get malware because somebody has your email address, except.
Their purpose in establishing
communication with you might be to gain your trust to the point of your trusting
them enough to click on a link or open an attachment.
So this is where it really all does come
back to your own safety, your own security regimen and your own sense of skepticism.
Make sure that you're very careful opening or visiting anything that someone you are
not completely sure of is sharing with you.
Making contact over the Internet, honestly, is wonderful.
I mean, I found friends and family members simply because of the Internet.
It's a great way to retain communication
in a world where we are all so geographically diverse.
But it's also a case where you can't
really let your guard down specifically for the cases that you've
mentioned, online dating sites want ads and others.
You do need to be very careful and very
wary of the way that your information can be used by whomever you're giving it to.
I hope that was helpful and shouldn't be
too alarming for the original article on which this video is based.
For any updates, related links, comments and more, visit
askleo.com/4944
I'm Leo Notenboom.
This is askleo.com. Thanks for watching.