Is Hackaday selling private account information?

Eric Hertz wrote 06/14/2021 at 22:36 4 points

i posted a log entry a while back only tangentially mentioning a well known standards organization in the electronics field and literally the next day received an automatic subscription to that organization's email list. My email address is private information I shared with Hackaday only for the sake of Hackaday's being able to contact me regarding notifications and such. I certainly never authorized Hackaday to give my personal information to others, and in fact distinctly remember seeing "this will not be shared with others." So, how, then, do you explain that I was automatically-subscribed to an email list through my otherwise "private" email address the day after posting that log-entry? 

The only other explanation is that i did a very brief Google search for references to the organization's standards in datasheets from other manufacturers. I did not go to that organization's site, at all. Google does some extremely fishy stuff, but notifying companies of users searches, then allowing those companies to extract and then directly contact Google's users' email addresses by merely doing a search and not even clicking on their page...? I doubt even Google would open up that can of worms...

So, which is it? Has the evil empire really gotten /that/ out of hand, or was it an honest mistake in judgment by HaD thinking their users might enjoy the benefits of being connected with organizations that set standards in their field, without being /asked/?

ask