I had Barak Obama subscribe to me awhile back. Who knew that the former POTUS was interested in English pubs, castles and periodic rants? His interest was fleeting, I think because I didn't subscribe back-politicians are such narcissists. Your email link story is more concerning. Is the whole enterprise just one big AI farm, anyway?
I had “Willie Nelson” send me some very friendly messages on Substack a while back and I was very excited. It turned out it wasn’t really him and Substack refused to answer my questions.
Not sure if this is still the case, but the Substack iOS apps used to harvest contacts from the device by default, with no opt-out, so that might explain it
It is possible to add any email to your subscriber list as long as you claim that you have the person’s approval. Substack have muddied the waters by mixing newsletter functionality with their locked-in social network.
I haven’t added anyone’s email to my subscriber list at any time though. This was a response to a “suggested follow”. I mean, that’s a problem too but it’s a different problem.
Yes, what I meant was that once someone - anyone - has added them, they are in the Substack system. Presumably uploading contacts helps the matching process.
This sounds similar-- recently I got an email in my personal inbox from a political org of some sort with a Substack return email address. I have never heard of the org much less subscribed to their Substack, and a DM to them went, not surprisingly, unanswered. Their website is obscure and gives no info about who this is.
Was the mail a legitimate Substack email? I could see scammers sending such a mail to two plausibly connected people with a virus behind the big "follow back" button.
Just checking you were aware that, unless you/they opt out, lists of who you follow and who follows you are open to anyone on the platform (and I think this is part of the substack terms of service)
So it's possible for any enterprising third party to scrape this info and send it to email addresses it may have (perhaps bought from a legit data broker).
I *think* from a DPA/gdpr perspective, the concern would be whether such a party can show it obtained the email addresses legitimately and has the right opt-out/"forget me" procedures. As a third party, they may also be violating Substacks ToS but that's a private concern.
Anyroad, the fact that X (now) follows Y is pretty much public? (Realise I may be fully missing your point...)
My point, such as it is, is that it might be public knowledge (I don’t see why it shouldn’t be) that I follow a profile called (f’rinstance) Famous Writer Esq on Substack. But it’s hinky to me that when I do, the real Famous Writer, who isn’t on the platform, gets an email at his personal address famouswriter@btinternet.com - which is known to me and presumably the contacts I shared with Substack for friend-finding purposes but not (AFAIK) shared with Substack by him or associated with this or any profile. I thought giving Substack access to your contacts list would allow them to tell you which of your contacts is on here, but not to use your stash of emails and phone numbers as they choose.
I had a read of https://substack.com/privacy. It was murky. Under "Other users" there seemed to be a suggestion that they might have asked you to agree to share stuff with "...the public, or with other accounts socially connected to your own, such as your social media followers."
But really not sure what that amounts to. Conceivably, quite a lot?
It feels like there's one plausible innocent explanation here which is that maybe the writer in question *is* "on Substack", in the sense of having set up a profile without really realising it, in the course of interacting with Substack some other way. A useful clue would be whether the Substack profile using this writer's name, the one you followed, is a passive account with no posts or notes, or whether it's actively posting content. (These sorts of startling experiences are still a problem of platform design anyway to be clear – Substack shouldn't be causing people nasty surprises whatever the real story!)
[Damn fat finger, sorry. ]… sets you up a profile without telling you quite clearly that that’s what it’s doing. I’d probably have remembered if it had been more than an orange egg, though. TBH I don’t know which profile it will have been, though, and cba scrolling through my follow list on my phone to try to find it
I had Barak Obama subscribe to me awhile back. Who knew that the former POTUS was interested in English pubs, castles and periodic rants? His interest was fleeting, I think because I didn't subscribe back-politicians are such narcissists. Your email link story is more concerning. Is the whole enterprise just one big AI farm, anyway?
Funny, yes. I agree that that’s one thing and the email link is another though.
I had “Willie Nelson” send me some very friendly messages on Substack a while back and I was very excited. It turned out it wasn’t really him and Substack refused to answer my questions.
Not sure if this is still the case, but the Substack iOS apps used to harvest contacts from the device by default, with no opt-out, so that might explain it
It is possible to add any email to your subscriber list as long as you claim that you have the person’s approval. Substack have muddied the waters by mixing newsletter functionality with their locked-in social network.
I haven’t added anyone’s email to my subscriber list at any time though. This was a response to a “suggested follow”. I mean, that’s a problem too but it’s a different problem.
Yes, what I meant was that once someone - anyone - has added them, they are in the Substack system. Presumably uploading contacts helps the matching process.
This sounds similar-- recently I got an email in my personal inbox from a political org of some sort with a Substack return email address. I have never heard of the org much less subscribed to their Substack, and a DM to them went, not surprisingly, unanswered. Their website is obscure and gives no info about who this is.
Was the mail a legitimate Substack email? I could see scammers sending such a mail to two plausibly connected people with a virus behind the big "follow back" button.
Actually, no, I checked. It was the standard no-reply@substack.com
Possible I guess, yes
Just checking you were aware that, unless you/they opt out, lists of who you follow and who follows you are open to anyone on the platform (and I think this is part of the substack terms of service)
See https://substack.com/@samleith/reads and https://substack.com/@samleith/subscribers
So it's possible for any enterprising third party to scrape this info and send it to email addresses it may have (perhaps bought from a legit data broker).
I *think* from a DPA/gdpr perspective, the concern would be whether such a party can show it obtained the email addresses legitimately and has the right opt-out/"forget me" procedures. As a third party, they may also be violating Substacks ToS but that's a private concern.
Anyroad, the fact that X (now) follows Y is pretty much public? (Realise I may be fully missing your point...)
My point, such as it is, is that it might be public knowledge (I don’t see why it shouldn’t be) that I follow a profile called (f’rinstance) Famous Writer Esq on Substack. But it’s hinky to me that when I do, the real Famous Writer, who isn’t on the platform, gets an email at his personal address famouswriter@btinternet.com - which is known to me and presumably the contacts I shared with Substack for friend-finding purposes but not (AFAIK) shared with Substack by him or associated with this or any profile. I thought giving Substack access to your contacts list would allow them to tell you which of your contacts is on here, but not to use your stash of emails and phone numbers as they choose.
I had a read of https://substack.com/privacy. It was murky. Under "Other users" there seemed to be a suggestion that they might have asked you to agree to share stuff with "...the public, or with other accounts socially connected to your own, such as your social media followers."
But really not sure what that amounts to. Conceivably, quite a lot?
It feels like there's one plausible innocent explanation here which is that maybe the writer in question *is* "on Substack", in the sense of having set up a profile without really realising it, in the course of interacting with Substack some other way. A useful clue would be whether the Substack profile using this writer's name, the one you followed, is a passive account with no posts or notes, or whether it's actively posting content. (These sorts of startling experiences are still a problem of platform design anyway to be clear – Substack shouldn't be causing people nasty surprises whatever the real story!)
Weird, yeah. Maybe, I guess; though if so it’s odd that just interacting sets
[Damn fat finger, sorry. ]… sets you up a profile without telling you quite clearly that that’s what it’s doing. I’d probably have remembered if it had been more than an orange egg, though. TBH I don’t know which profile it will have been, though, and cba scrolling through my follow list on my phone to try to find it
Yeah… I can’t recall if that’s how Substack works but “you have to opt out if you don’t want a profile” is definitely how some places work