Stop unsolicited “View Notification” emails.

Dynotag does NOT sell advertising or share your information with third parties.  You are in full control of who can view which parts of your data. 

Any information in your record that is NOT password protected can be viewed by others.  It is easy for any web address to be “scraped” off casual Internet traffic, such as email or browser viewing.

We will explain the potential cause and suggest a simple solution to your concern. If you want, you can skip to the section “Suggested solution” below or read the background first.

Background

Your Dynotag Smart IDs have their private web addresses which enable you to share them electronically, by simply making their unique web address available in emails, text messages, social media posts and so on. While this is convenient, we need to be aware of standard privacy issues.

As a first line of defense, several Dynotag Smart ID record types present a “CAPTCHA” challenge, a simple math addition, to fend off most automated programs from viewing your Smart ID record. The CAPTCHA challenge is configured per ID Tag, under the “Advanced” settings, so if you prefer no View CAPTCHA challenge for a specific tag, that can be arranged.

For example, Gmail performs scraping of all email routinely (it’s in their terms and conditions). Similarly, if you have any web browser extensions installed (with or without your consent) – they are likely to scrape and sell every bit of information about your browsing activities (we advise against installing those). 

Similarly, many browsers and most search engines routinely eavesdrop when you look anything up through them.  Any links they scrape, their “bots” may visit later to find out more – after all, they are maintaining an Internet catalog.  If they scraped a dynotag tag web address, the bots may visit that as well. This goes unnoticed in most cases but the difference with dynotags is – we let you know via a “view notification” message. 

Suggested solution:

If you ever received such an extraneous “view” notification, you can simply turn on the password protection at the Smart ID Tag level. For most Smart ID Tag models, the activation key code is right on the tag, and it should be convenient for a real human to see and enter it when asked. A bot, on the other hand, cannot pass that challenge.

Ideally, we suggest leaving minimal information as viewable without a password, so it’s easy to view – and securing more sensitive information with a password.

Note that for stickers – you may have to assign a record level password/hint as the activation code is not printed on each sticker product.  Contact our support team if you have questions about that.

Follow these steps to turn the password protection on for a tag:

1. Sign into your dynotag account.
2. On the “My Records” page, click on the record your tag is linked to. 
   This will take you to that record’s dashboard.
3. Click on the  Record Access Control   widget,  which is  at  level  green     
   Not Password Protected
   And select  level yellow      
   Password Protected
4. Click “Save” when done. Your record and all its linked tags are now password protected.
5. Always perform a “Test View” of the record to verify your setup behaves as expected.

From that point forward, viewing the tag will require entering the tag password.   

Web crawlers and other software robots cannot pass the password challenge – and hence cannot access your tag and cause extraneous “view notification” emails…

You can learn more about our security capabilities here.

More about “Access Log” entries and “View Notification Emails” here.