The content was innocent enough, but when they sent out the mailing, they made a critical error: they had pasted the entire mailing list of addresses into the Recipients field in their mail program. As a result, every parent had every other parent’s email address. Some never noticed, and others didn’t really care. Several were displeased about this breach of privacy and let the school know about it.

That individual had committed the same error as many friends and family do when they want to share a message with many people.

This social faux-pas is easy to prevent, so I include here a quick set of instructions on how to maintain your mailing list’s privacy when you have a large mailing to send out.

What’s the problem?

When you send an email to a few dozen people, you risk the following:

• Some people might be upset because you are passing their private email address around in public. Treat the email list as if it were a list of private phone numbers. Would you send such a list to everyone you know?
• You are exposing everyone on the list to an increased spam risk. If anyone has a virus-compromised email account or is a spammer themselves (perish the thought!), they will now have access to the entire list of your friends.
• It is quite possible that someone in the mailing list will click “reply all” and either send personal information meant for you to everyone else, or at least annoy the others on the list.

Keeping it Private

The solution is very simple:

• Put your own address in the To field.
• Put all of your friends’ addresses in the BCC field—Blind Carbon Copy.
• Compose and send your email.

Your friends will receive an email that contains only your address and their address; they cannot see any of the other names on the list, even if they were to dig into the gritty details of the email headers.

Have Consideration

When you send a message to a large mailing list, please

• Keep their email addresses private
• Edit out unnecessary content of forwarded messages
• Respect their wishes if they ask to be removed from your list
• Carefully consider if your mailing is appropriate for everyone in the group

In other words, don’t become a spammer in your friends’ eyes.

And the bits of the search string I saw had nothing to do with what I had copied. Clearly my Control-C did not “take” and I had pasted whatever stuff had been hanging around from the prior user.
My curiosity got the better of me and I opened Notepad and did a quick Control-V and watched in amazement as a young girl’s secrets were exposed before my eyes.

She is clearly struggling in her relationship with her boyfriend, because she had listed about fifty bad points about him in detail—and some were pretty bad. She then listed a dozen or so good points at the bottom. And I must admit that I read the whole story…and felt a voyeuristic guilt with each word.

I then closed Notepad and purged the clipboard and felt much better.
Of course, that doesn’t change the fact that I will feel uncomfortable the next time I see her. I feel like I snuck into her room and read her diary.

This is what she had done: She had written her personal note in Word or some other tool and then likely decided to email it to herself, so she copied and pasted the sordid details of her love life into Gmail, forgetting to purge the clipboard before going home.

And I, with no malice or intent, bumbled into her secrets.

Learn from the mistakes of others!

When was the last time you used a public computer at the library or worked on a common computer at school or work? Did you leave anything behind?

I never really considered that this book might raise eyebrows until some years later when I was in the Navy. We had just come back from a cruise and everyone was heading out to their dormant cars to go off base. One of my shipmates was quite surprised to find police surrounding his vehicle when he reached the parking lot. It seems that a few weeks prior, some night watchman had seen two curious items in the back seat with his flashlight: the butt of a BB pistol and … The Anarchist Cookbook. He sure had some ‘splainin’ to do about that one. They were more interested in the book than the pistol.

What about today? Do we have to worry if our reading habits are known to others?

Though I chuckle at the thought that anyone would care that I have Clive Cussler in my Kindle, it’s not difficult to imagine situations where one might not want Kindle searches or eBook library contents known:

• People reading hotly political materials that might attract unwanted government attention.
• Folks who are reading materials that hint at their sexual orientation, a fact they might wish to keep private.
• Readers who are searching for materials on one of many different illnesses, that they might not want potential employers and insurers to know about.

Want to know how eBook vendors are treating your privacy? Here’s an article on the subject by Ed Bayley on the Deeplinks Blog:

An E-Book Buyer’s Guide to Privacy

This article provides a table with five key e-reader technologies—Google Books, Amazon Kindle, B&N Nook, Sony Reader, and FBReader—and provides answers to several key privacy questions for each product.

Even if you have nothing to hide, think about this: Considering how poorly Amazon chooses recommendations for me, I wonder how poorly our government might pigeonhole me based on my book collection. One thing is certain: somewhere in that list is one ancient copy of The Anarchist Cookbook!