Using Disposable Services

You signed up for a free service and now you are being bombarded with spam emails?

If this is all too familiar to you, then your data has most likely been sold to a third party. Companies are doing this basically to make a quick buck. User data is worth a lot of money and when you have plenty of it, you can make a healthy profit. Google and Facebook are examples of this. Often people think these services are free just because they are nice people. Although they might be nice people, they are actually analyzing and selling your data in order to make money.

“Last quarter, Facebook’s average revenue per user was $25.91 in the U.S. and Canada compared to $5.97 worldwide. This quarter, Facebook’s average revenue per user was $27.61 in the U.S. and Canada compared to $6.09 worldwide. That’s the highest it’s been for North America.”

https://digiday.com/marketing/facebooks-making-money-per-user-north-america-ever/

Now you may hink that $6 a year isn’t that much but when you multiple that by 2.32 billion, you start to see why they do it.

So how do you stop all the spam and junk emails but still use the service?

By using disposable services, that’s how. Not many people know that these services exist which is a shame as they can really come in handy. These services come in the form of disposable mailboxes and phone numbers. Below are a few examples of some of the services out there. You can use these when the service asks for an email address that you need to verify. The services will either be constantly live or replaced every hour. This gives you time to verify your account and use the service without associating it with you personal account.

Disposable Mailboxes:

https://temp-mail.org/

https://www.guerrillamail.com/

https://www.mailinator.com/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bloody-vikings/

Disposable SMS

https://freephonenum.com/

https://receive-smss.com/

https://www.temp-phone-number.com/

** Do remember that these services are free to use but are publicly shared!

Don’t use these for anything personal as multiple people will be able to see it. Instead use them when you want to use a service but don’t want all the junk that comes with it. I often use them when testing software or want to quickly test out a free service. When I use disposable services, I often don’t want to share my personal details with the site as I don’t trust it or I just want to test out a service quickly and don’t care if the credentials get compromised.