Usually, we here at Privacy Council give you information about spam, scams and computer viruses that might compromise your personal privacy and the health of your computer. But in light of recent news, we’d like to devote this post to the Swine Flu and what precautions you can take to protect yourself and your family [...]

read more from " Avoiding the Swine Flu Similar to Avoiding Computer Viruses "

Spammers are industrious creatures. They know how to capitalize on an opportunity, and they move quickly. Since President Barack Obama took office a little more than a month ago, I’ve begun to receive emails allegedly from Obama himself, promising me a share of a variety of stimulus packages and government handouts. I doubt very much [...]

read more from " Marketing Hall of Shame: the “President Obama” email "

We’ve posted many articles about the headaches caused by email spam. But when you think about it, the spam messages we all get in our email inboxes can be as amusing as they are annoying. After all, the ads for “increasing your size” or “cleansing your colon” are often peppered with ridiculous claims, odd grammar, [...]

read more from " Creative uses for email spam (shocking but true) "

Text messages on our cell phones make everything more convenient. Banking is no exception, and many banks now offer text message alerts and updates, such as notifications when our balances are low. Mobile banking makes many people’s lives easier. But of course, with this convenient technology comes another means of stealing your identity, and you must [...]

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In these troubling financial times, when foreclosures and lagging home sales are covering the market in a pall of doom and gloom, it makes sense that consumers would be searching for an escape from the crisis. Thank goodness we have spammers who are willing to spread the word about loan modification, complete with hall of [...]

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Ah, spam. The annoying cyber-pollution that crams our inboxes has prompted most of us to use filters to keep the unsolicited ads out of our email. But as spammers have gotten more savvy with their wording and spam filters have had to become more restrictive to keep up, ordinary emails are getting caught more and more often [...]

read more from " Spam filters getting so tough, regular email is crippled "

Some good news on the spam front this month: worldwide spam was cut in half when a single web hosting firm was shut down, The Washington Post reported. McColo Corp, a company based in San Jose, California (but claiming a Delaware mailing address), allegedly operated servers that sent spam messages for various international groups. These clients, in [...]

read more from " In the News: A Small Respite from Spam "

I received this spam email a few days ago. The subject line caught me first: “Cleanse and Flush up to 20lbs from your colon!” The rest of the email reads like this:
Lose Weight With Your Mate! – Flush out up to 25 pounds – Remove Deadly Toxic Buildup – Relieve Constipation and Bloating – Best of [...]

read more from " Marketing Hall of Shame: Cleanse Your Colon (And Your Grasp of Reality) "

A few years ago, I was checking my Yahoo! email account and saw that I had received dozens of strange emails. All of them were listed as “undeliverable,” as if I’d sent the emails out, but then they’d gone to a nonexistent email address and bounced back to me. The problem was, I didn’t recall [...]

read more from " Backscatter Spam is an Undeliverable Pain "

Ask anyone who gets email, and they’ll tell you how much they hate email spam. We all get tired of the dozens of messages that end up in the “bulk” or “spam” folders of our inboxes, advertising cheap (and questionable) pharmaceuticals or fabulous (and also questionable) mortgage rates. We install increasingly-sophisticated spam filters in an [...]

read more from " Spam isn’t going anywhere as long as it works "