I’m sure you’ve already been into a website where it is inviting you to subscribe to a newsletter, then below the “subscribe me” button, there’s a mention similar to “we respect your privacy“. Have already seen such websites?

Those are common practices when it comes to dealing with website visitors. Simply put: website owners want to leverage on your visiting of their website to establish a connection with you.

Unless your website is Facebook, Youtube or other free online e-mail system, webmasters know that there’s a high chance you won’t come back to their website once you left it – or at least, you won’t do it on a regular basis. While most websites are now inviting you to connect with them on some social media profiles (usually Facebook, Twitter or Youtube), e-mail still remains the main media that most webmasters choose so as to keep in touch with you.

Some webmasters only resend their RSS feed to you by e-mail, while others take some more time to craft a nice newsletter content so as to engage you or to invite you to come back and check their websites. So they invite you to subscribe to a newsletter.

On the other side, a lot of people are complaining about receiving too much-unsolicited e-mails (commonly identified as SPAM) mainly because some marketing companies are collecting e-mails from the internet then sell this database.

Most serious webmasters would use a double opt-in newsletter so as to actually confirm that you really want to subscribe. A double opt-in means that:

  • first, you need to enter your e-mail address on a webpage (sometimes they are also asking for other information, like a name or a Zip code)
  • you then receive a confirmation link on your e-mail
  • you have to click on this confirmation link so as to actually confirm that you definitely want to subscribe to the newsletter

If the webmaster is using some advanced newsletter manager like Aweber, or GetResponse or iContact, then those systems track the following once you subscribe:

  • the info you have provided: usually an e-mail address and a name,
  • the IP address as well as the time you subscribed

By law, for every e-mail campaign they send, it is mandatory that those webmasters include an “unsubscribe” link. Most serious newsletter manager automatically do it.

So this depicts how the whole system works. Now let’s go back to the topic to this article. In fact, you may have noticed it, how-to-hide-ip is also providing such service – have you noticed that we are giving you the opportunity to download the free (and very useful BTW) e-book which title is “Protect your privacy- hide your IP address” – in case you haven’t downloaded it yet, I strongly suggest you do so as it is well organized and it is also addressing the common issues.

In fact, I want to get some kind of feedback from how-to-hide-ip readers: how comfortable are you subscribing to such newsletters? Do you think there’s a privacy risk in providing the information requested from those newsletter forms? How do you feel about the “we respect your privacy”  statement? Feel free to share your experience and what you think should be improved for how-to-hide-ip newsletters?