Email providers and ad networks may use what lands in an inbox to choose the ads you see. Here is what a few of your own lines could add up to.
Pieced TogetherWhat could an advertiser piece together from your inbox?
Every email line is a jigsaw piece. One alone says little; a few together make a picture. Paste some sender and subject lines and see what they add up to - then pull pieces out until the picture blurs.
1 Your lines
One email per line: the sender, then the subject. Up to 40 lines. Addresses, links and long numbers are swapped for placeholders before anything is sent.
Getting lines out: type them from your inbox list, or open a mail export (.csv) - a file with From and Subject columns is turned into lines for you.
2 The puzzle free
Pieces - tap a piece or its button to pull it out
The page's quick guess
3 Read it like an ad system
One run places every line in an interest group or leaves it loose, rates the picture, flags sensitive groups, and for each group says what it gives away, the ads that would follow and one way to hide it. The page re-checks the reply against its own rule.
The finished picture - none yet
-Loose pieces
The page's check
4 Saved puzzles
How it works
Each line becomes one piece. A group is an interest or life area an ad system might target; it is clear when two or more lines point to it. The picture is an open book with three or more clear groups, half done with one or two clear groups (or two or more single-line groups), and a few pieces otherwise. Password resets, sign-in alerts, receipts and shipping updates that name nothing are loose pieces. The quick guess in the page only matches keywords; the run reads meaning.
Privacy: only paste lines from your own inbox. Redaction runs in your browser before a run; the redacted lines are sent to the model for that one run. Nothing is kept unless you press save, and saved puzzles keep the redacted lines only. This is a playful guess at what an advertiser could infer - not a statement of what any company holds, and not privacy or legal advice.