Do multiple e-mail aliases on the same domain protect privacy?

Question

Many web services require a valid email address for registration. If I use the same address for every service, only one needs to be hacked, and soon the adress is "contaminated" with spam. Furthermore, using the same email address makes matching my behavior data across services dead easy.

The only solution to this I could come up with is to register some private domain and then create aliases for every web service. Then, one can identify which services have a spam leak. Also, cross site matching is a little bit more difficult.

But I am completely unsure whether this works in practice. Will multiple email aliases increase my privacy at all or do they simply shift data matching to the (unique) domain level?

Is there a even better way to handle multiple web services without ignoring the spam/matching problem?

Answer 1

The problem with profiling isn't so much your registration email address as it is the cookies sites put on your system. If you allow Facebook to put a cookie on your system, any site you visit with a Facebook like button will report your presence at the site - even if you don't click the button. The individual websites won't normally share your mail address since many will be (stupidly) using it as your login name.

As far as spam is concerned, that's even harder of a problem. Yes a different mail address might help you try and identify, but spam is mainly people blasting to [e-mail], [e-mail], [e-mail] ad infinitum since email is essentially free and you only need a microscopic number of suckers replying back. You wouldn't really be sure if it was a blasted email or a site leak. And even then, are you willing to forfeit the site's use? Maybe create a throwaway account and set max filtering and ignore the account except for those times you need to use it. Don't use your main email account.