I'd believe this if I had actually done these things. I have been forthcoming in this thread about my financial connections. There is no connection to me past or present to any sort of professional financial services. The NYSE would, I would hope, find in any investigation that I am certainly not a professional. I don't even have my CTA or series exams.
As a victim of identity theft, and a fairly astute user of tech, I can advise that there are some simple steps you can take to protect your privacy on the public web. (And my ID theft happened not because of some shit I did on a website, but when the OPM database was hacked some years ago. They got my social and filed a false tax return with it. I got it straightened out within 18 months. It sucked but no real damage was done.) For instance, Facebook. DON'T PUT YOUR REAL NAME AND BIRTHDATE IN IT! Oh, you did already? Too bad you cannot change it. Oh well, make a new fake account, or continue to use the one with all your real information. Did you use your REAL NAME in anything else? Oh well, too bad that the information is now in the cloud. No point in trying to change it. Advertisers? Well, for one, just ignore advertisers. Don't click the ads. Don't feed the ad.doubleclick.net monkey. Don't put in real information into anything you use online that is public. It is really quite simple.
In the early days of the internet I used the birthday Feb 29, 1960. That way I only age once every 4 years and no one knew my real one.
Consider the things that you store in your email: 1. Bank records 2. Purchase histories 3. Shipping notices 4. Medical record emails (a lot of doctors offices are doing this now) 5. Love letters 6. Personal emails to family All of this is data mined by some of the big names (not protonmail as far as I know). It's not as easy as "don't click the ads". Your data is gobbled up and thrown into a machine that builds a portfolio of you that it can track across the web. It is nearly impossible to avoid it. In fact, most social tech services can deduce your exact birthdate and name based almost entirely by who you associate with and your tendencies. Throw in data mined cell phone location data and some other things like camera tracking on street corners and they basically know who you are without you even realizing it. A private email takes away a lot of the ability of these nefarious big-name tech companies to data mine your most private data. It is not as simple as you think to avoid being tracked anymore unfortunately.
Wow! So being merely curious about stuff and researching it there flags you as so smart that you MUST be a professional trader? The earth is doomed.
My email does not store items #1, 2, and 4. It simply gives me links to the site to those records so I can access them with another layer of security. As for #3, 5 and 6? They can farm that all they want. It is not going to get them any closer to my identity than anyone else would. If anyone wants to go full paranoia, they can just sign up with a VPN and get https://www.torproject.org/projects/torbrowser.html.en *shrugs*
Actually TradeStation is the only one that I am just hearing today that actually uses an email domain to determine a trader's professional status for data usage purpose. This is unacceptable.
It's totally unreal and reflects pretty badly on the flexibility and overall intellect of that firm. Even if an exchange was breathing down their neck on non sensical issues I would never want to work with a broker who bows to such tactics. .
Actually your email domain, no matter how private, as long as it's connected to the internet, they will have a way to find out who you are, where you are and everything about you even if you are behind a VPN, proxy server and bounce through several dummy servers . Your domain provider would have all your information anyway. If somebody wants to get you, they will get you. I gave up on privacy long time ago.