I did a search (DDG, Chromium) for an Anker product line that I've been following. Clicked the link to Anker, skimmed, nothing new.

Then shortly I get an email from "Checkmate" with a promo offer.

I don't have an Anker account or whatever, don't recall signing in. I figure it's fingerprinting or cookies, but so far it's never been so overt.

I feel like this is an indicator of something, some sea change. Of needing to squeeze more water from the stone. My phone's been blowing up with spam calls since. I've been mysteriously added to email lists. I'm getting short-code text spam in addition to the regular spam, which when I report to 7726, AT&T basically tells me it's fine, it's paid for.

This may be a ploy to get me to turn the AI features back on in Gmail, but it feels like somewhere, lines have been crossed.

In that time I have had 'leaks' twice: my State's Fish and Wildlife licensing organ, and GitHub. In both cases I assume it's more that the email ends up being public, not because of something like Apollo.

I guess it's possible that spam is getting filtered before it ever hits my inbox.

Edit: I was responding to the idea of it leading to spam, not that Apollo wasn't collecting information on me.

For those curious: I signed up with Apollo and looked at what they had on me (via the link in the flagged/dead post by fontain). The email address they have is technically correct, but it's a non-current work email. It's still active and I do get a lot of senseless/bizarre business sales inquiries on that address. The phone number they have is wrong and I don't recognize it. They have my LinkedIn byline; it's likely how I was 'found' so quickly, as my username is the same there. I'm listed as cold.

I have had the same work email address for 13 years. I have done lots of hardware and software purchasing in that time, and I am never shy of using my work email to sign up for things and give to account managers etc. It is used on my microsoft SSO, my Dell business account, my slack account etc etc.

After I jumped through all their hoops to opt out, I got this email from them:

"We searched our records with your email: xxx@xxxxxx but could not find any information associated to it in our databases. We will keep your email: xxx@xxxxxx in our suppression list in order not to create any data associated with your email. "

So I guess they might not be as ubiquitous in their data capture as you may have thought? Or they are straight up lying.

5. BrowserStack gets hit by a massive GDPR fine.