Publishing your email publicly?

Sometimes I'm marveled and get amused by the gullibility of girls / women in forums. Please do not get me wrong, not trying to be a sexist here. I just want to highlight a potential serious problem.

More often than not, I never fail to come across such a thread in any kind of forums:

• Facebook? Anyone?
• Friendster list, pls add
• Come add everyone in facebook/friendster/myspace

And what do we get? A nice list of email accounts, without wasting any efforts to pharm for or whatsoever.

Here's what I mean:

A list of email addresses posted willingly and without guard in a lady-dominated forum. **Note: Just because it's a lady-dominated forum doesn't = safe. There's no technology so far as yet to verify the actual gender of the person signing up to join the forum.

And using the email addresses to perform a search in facebook/friendster/myspace, you should get this:

What can we do with such results? In this scenario of Facebook, if your profile is not protected, people can start sniffing out your profile info, pictures, etc. This is how identify theft begins. =)

Here's a perfect case study.

I shall not elaborate into details on the other malicious intents people can use them for. But I don't think you would very much like to get your email address to be circulated around half the globe. Unless you're an ADS (Attention Deficit Syndrome) sufferer.

Furthermore, this is one of the causes why you receive SPAM in your INBOX.

So, surf safe k?