Have you ever been caught up in a situation where all of a sudden your email account was inundated with spammy, phishing emails ? Well, I sure this has happened with most of us and I really hate it. You mis out on critical emails and your overall work efficiency is decreased because you're now spending time on filtering emails rather than replying on them.
Not only spammy emails are a nuisance but they are also a security problem. Email spam evolves much faster than anti-spam features of your mail account. As spammers continuously try to find way into your accounts and if you may accidentally fall prey to them then they dictate the terms, even ask for ransom in some cases.
The fact that our email accounts are actually stored and sold to various eCommerce entities without our consent is outrageous. So, I think it is important to understand, how do your email accounts gets leaked for sale ? Even if you only used your account on reputed sites like Amazon, eBay, BestBuy which I am sure are not involved but still some people are able to get it.
The biggest case is sites with social login, while social login make our lives easier by directly logging in to any site, you're actually supplying your email account in return to the site.
Why it matters for your WordPress site ?
Now, if you own an eCommerce store on WordPress or Shopify and you're using some plugin which uses its own custom API (not open source) for social login be aware that you're actually supplying your customer's data to them. In effect this is critical data related to your eCommerce store.
There are plenty of plugins on WordPress which are actually doing this. Some of them are very popular. If you're not setting up apps on Google, Facebook, Twitter but setting up an account and getting an api key from a third party website, then you're practically selling your customer's emails to them. This tiny detail ~ customer email + what your site is about ( what your customers are buying ) is very important factor and worth a lot of money. This information forms a critical part of Customer acquisition cost in eCommerce, you can check this link on how much it values.
Yes, setting up apps on Google, Facebook, Twitter is time consuming but at least it guarantees that your customer's data is safe with you and not sold out to the market.
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