Toxic Elephant

Don't bury it in your back yard!

Training People to Just Click Anything

Posted by matijs 31/01/2010 at 12h18

Today I got an email from someone using a hotmail account. At the bottom was the following text:

Hotmail: Trusted email with Microsoft’s powerful SPAM protection. Sign up now.

The text “Sign up now” links to a URL that is completely opaque. Not in the old-style non-Web-2.0 company website way, where at least the domain name would tell you it’s a legitimate link to one of the company’s websites. No, it’s domain part was clk.atdmt.com.

If we/they/whoever expect people to click such links, how can we ever expect people stop clicking links like http://hotmail.com.xdfsf.cn/please/hack/me/totally?

It’s almost as bad as training people to give their email login and password to any site that asks them to.

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