> The truth is no one really sells your email – at least no legitimate companies. The one outlier is political campaigns: they'll share your email till the end of time. No matter what I do I can't get bernie@ purged from any lists. Every level of government has that email and they share it as widely as they can. I'm pretty sure I only gave him $20 a decade ago.
Interestingly, when I was in Texas this never happened. I voted, I attended rallies, etc... The Democratic and Libertarian parties there just never sold my information; moreover, they never added me to lists or texting campaigns.
Then, I moved to California and the flood gates opened. I was getting back to back text messages from "campaign organizers". Later, I found out these are just normal people texting me from a burner phone because I angrily replied to one of the texts. Why, in this day and age, the Democratic party would entrust my name and phone number (and who knows what else) to some random "volunteer" or "advocate" is beyond me. You don't need to spend more than five minutes on the internet to understand many people who use that title do so with misaligned intentions.
Nowadays, I report their numbers to Google and they automatically go to spam.
I think they are mostly using a tool that proxies the SMS communications between you and the volunteer. But I don't know what tool or what its privacy or security features might look like.
Here in California the campaigns can get copies of the contact info on everyone's voter registrations: "pursuant to Elections Code §2188 and §2194, voter registration information is available for electoral, scholarly, journalistic and political purposes, as well as governmental purposes, as determined by the California Secretary of State."
Interestingly, when I was in Texas this never happened. I voted, I attended rallies, etc... The Democratic and Libertarian parties there just never sold my information; moreover, they never added me to lists or texting campaigns.
Then, I moved to California and the flood gates opened. I was getting back to back text messages from "campaign organizers". Later, I found out these are just normal people texting me from a burner phone because I angrily replied to one of the texts. Why, in this day and age, the Democratic party would entrust my name and phone number (and who knows what else) to some random "volunteer" or "advocate" is beyond me. You don't need to spend more than five minutes on the internet to understand many people who use that title do so with misaligned intentions.
Nowadays, I report their numbers to Google and they automatically go to spam.