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points by weird-eye-issue 2 days ago | 0 comments

I highly doubt this is connected

Usually this is from LinkedIn, GitHub, etc scraping... There are databases where they just guess and verify emails too

OP literally described a timescale for (not spam) to (spam) and you described a few possible options (basically a knee jerk reaction, with no evidence).

The medical world uses the terms indications and contraindications. I think we in IT could do with a similar process/procedure.

[–] ruszki 2 days ago

From somebody who helped fixing bugs by contacting customers directly: the first thing you need to throw out from their story is correlation. Most of the time, it's just a coincidence.

For example, my only used by Claude email address doesn't get any spam at all.

[–] weird-eye-issue 2 days ago

I'm sorry that I'm disputing their totally scientific "timescale". Btw did you mean timeline?

It can take a while for spammers to get your address on their list. Generally the amount of spam over time only goes up. Just because there's a correlation doesn't mean there is a causation. Anyone with an email address, including on a custom work domain, has experienced this and Claude wasn't responsible for all email spam lol

[–] jntun 1 day ago

Why are you being intentionally rude? Timescale is completely the right word and it is very telling that you didn't even bother to look up the definition, and in fact suggested a word that is more incorrect! I have a custom domain that is registered with very few select services and receive practically no spam. Are you trying to say that Anthropic should not be concerned with making their users' experience worse/better? Or that is simply our fault for being concerned about spam in our email inboxes?

[–] soraminazuki 1 day ago

Because a large chunk of this community sees anything that puts LLMs in a negative light as an attack on them.

[–] weird-eye-issue 1 day ago

I could care less about that but bringing up completely irrelevant things to blame it for is a bit annoying. At least stick to factual things.

Sites aren't scraping their logs for email address in request headers and selling that to spammers. Getting emails to spam is already easy.

I have email addresses I literally don't use to sign up for anything and they still get spam because you can easily guess the address based on first name on LinkedIn plus the company domain. Spam has been a thing since email was invented.

[–] soraminazuki 1 day ago

Please tell that to the LLM zealots. Because denial of documented facts is called pushing a narrative, not "sticking to facts."

There are numerous confirmed instances of websites asking to put personal information in the user agent string. And people here are downplaying, downvoting, or even denying that this issue exists. I am sick and tired of the relentless grifting that's overtaking the software industry.

[–] weird-eye-issue 1 day ago

I agree that there are some websites that it will send the email address and that Anthropic never should have put the email address in the prompt in the first place. I mean I can understand why they did it but it still seems pretty stupid to me. It's kind of like hardcoding API keys in your codebase, it saves a few minutes of time but is obviously not a good practice.

> I am sick and tired of the relentless grifting that's overtaking the software industry.

It's only going to get worse especially depending on your definition of grifting in this context. I've been doing this for a long time but these days I don't even write code. I have AI write the code, monitoring the logs, and suggesting PRs. Our users are happy, I'm happy, and we get features out very quickly without any sort of uptick in bugs. Some people consider that grifting but others will just see it as the current state of development. By the way that's the way that things will become more and more over time. It's scary how good AI is at things these days. I was testing it on 3D modeling with Blender yesterday and was blown away.

[–] weird-eye-issue 1 day ago

You are just putting words in my mouth. I agree Anthropic should not be putting the email addressing in prompts. But I'm simply disagreeing with the causation implied about how it is suddenly causing a bunch of spam.

I am a heavy user and I checked my logs and never once did it include my email in any sort of web requests. The chance that it actually included that person's email and then that led to them getting spammed is just incredibly low.

[–] paulddraper 2 days ago

Yeah. This information is insanely easy to get.

98% I look at a LinkedIn profile, my $SALES_LEAD Chrome extension shows me their email + phone.

(To be clear, not from LinkedIn, but given their name/city/company.)

[–] Foobar8568 2 days ago

Don't forget amazon.