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Ask HN: I keep receiving recruiters emails on an outdated address, any advice?

3 points by uVacCXNiiJCTnYB ↗ HN
There is a recruiter database somewhere that has an outdated email for me. The problem is I'm trans, and my old email outs my trans status and my deadname (because of the first-name.last-name email format).

I keep receiving many recruiter emails there lately, which means whichever contact database company they're using is outing me to dozens of company without my consent.

The problem is I can't find out which company it is. Every time I reply to one of those recruiters asking them where they got my email and/or if they can ask the database they got it from to update my info, they never reply. The best I got is someone telling me "they got it from a contact database". I have also tried mentioning GDPR to them (not sure if it has any legal value in this context?)

This is a big problem for me because being outed as trans and having such personal info revealed without my consent at the very first point of contact with a company makes me not even want to consider their job offers.

I have no idea how to fix this situation and don't know where to ask for help about it, but I figured maybe people on hackernews could have ideas as many of you have to deal with recruiters.

5 comments

[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 19.5 ms ] thread
bruce343434
Have you tried contacting the first couple of recruiters you had contact with via that email address?
MattGaiser
Have you tried haveibeenpwned? Maybe some DB leaked. The problem is that a lot of these databases exist, many just scraped from various sites.
uVacCXNiiJCTnYB
The problem is this email shouldn't be associated with my new name. And yes this email has previously been accessible publicly, it's very old and has been on linkedin or other things in the past, but it was under a different name. It should never have been associated with the new one.

My guess is that the email database updated one part of the data but not the other at one point or another from some public source.

In any case I don't really care how this happened, I mostly care about finding out which company is selling that wrong email to recruiters and how to fix it

MattGaiser
Any account crossover? Could they have loaded the email into LinkedIn and found you that way?
pestatije
Delete your old email account. They should start getting bounced emails. They can then assume anything: dead person, wrong email, bogus account, ...