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Nearly every email marketing platform does this for every email they send already, and that’s part of why thunderbird has had images off by default in email sin
by midnightmonster 7y ago
Nearly every email marketing platform does this for every email they send already, and that’s part of why thunderbird has had images off by default in email since a really long time. (Or maybe I set it that way years ago, but at least it’s an easy setting.) Is it weirder because it’s mail from an individual? I guess so.
- undecisive 7y agoProbably... maybe? Certainly I'd be weirded out if an online catalogue employee had found my name, decided to look at the geolocation data on the tracking pixel and was devotedly interested in where and when I decided to admire the latest in chinese tech. But I think the point is that this is much less likely than on a personal email, and if you don't know the person then it's a little less creepy because it has no emotional meaning to the "stalker"
- gowld 7y agoIt's strange that we put more faith and trust in sociopathic-by-design corporations (which are just large groups of people you don't know, but who have some interest in you) than in humans we willingly correspond with.
- xwdv 7y agoNo it isn’t. Corps are too big to care. An individual with specific interest in you can be far worse.
- billyhoffman 7y agoI mean, yeah I am weirded out by that, and don't like it. And I'm not trying to be (too) snarky, but seriously, what did you think people would do with this technology? HTML email + IP to location + simple automation has driven the multi-billion dollar Martech (marketing technology) market for years. The feature set you are describing has been standard for a years now: - They all use tracking pixels/logos-in-signatures for read receipts - Read receipts aren't boolean "someone read this!" but instead track when, how many times you opened it. - IP to location is used to understand location and route the lead/opportunity to the appropriate sales rep. - Email User-Agent fingerprinting is done to track device type - Most have automation, that allow you to automatically re-mail or even phone dial someone who has just opened an email after certain conditions are met. This is fairly basic technology, glued to together, creating powerful platforms for marketing and direct sales. On a site like HN, how could any of this come as a surprise?
- ajiang 7y agoI think you answered your own question. Email marketing platform? Yes they do track emails, but only providing the data for open rates, not a list of timestamps and locations where you opened the email.
- sbr464 7y agoMost do provide location, if the client doesn’t mask the IP.
- manigandham 7y agoCRMs do. Just about every email-sending tool collects that data, even if they don't show it to you in the UI.
- jatins 7y agoMixmax provides a list of timestamps and location.
- ig1 7y agoVirtually all sales and marketing teams use this technology (including the author's company where they use Hubspot).
- marssaxman 7y agoThat doesn't make it any less creepy.
- luckylion 7y agoAnd those are opt-in, I hope. Otherwise it's unsolicited commercial email, in other words, spam. Superhuman is an email client based on Gmail, so it's not only to send commercial emails to people that have agreed to receive commercial emails from you (and you've hopefully gotten them to opt-in to your privacy terms as well).
- braythwayt 7y ago1. I do not expect emails from my friends and family to include tracking pixels. So yes, this is not just "weird," but also social-engineering: It exploits people who are not Superhuman users, who do not opt into being tracked, and do not expect to be tracked by emails from friends and family. 2. If there is a tracker, the second thing I expect is that it tells people whether I read the email. I do not expect it to also track location. Well, being an HN user I do. But the typical email recipient (who I repeat is NOT a Superhuman user) does not expect to be geotagged when they open an email from friends/family. 3. If I do figure out that I'm being geotagged, I am going to think it's like Google, some sort of thing that goes into the cloud and is sold to optimize my advertising or what-not. Nobody opens an email and thinks that the person who sent it to them will be told where they were when they opened the email. In my opinion, "weird" is not the word for any of the three things I've listed. It is not nearly strong enough to describe taking advantage of people's (possibly flawed) model for how email and tracking works.
- Alex3917 7y agoEvery time you reply to an email it includes your location, and almost no one knows this either. Everyone who uses email is basically agreeing to a contract that they haven't read, and wouldn't understand even if they had read. Usually this doesn't matter, but occasionally weird things happen as a result. That's not to say that anything goes, but it's also important to look at this in context.
- LUmBULtERA 7y ago>it includes your location To be specific, it shows your public IP, right? Using a VPN means this will not show your location, correct?
- gumby 7y agoIt shows your IP address to the machine you submit your message, and that SMTP server doesn't add the IP address in a Received: header, as mine does not, nobody else will know what IP address you used.
- danso 7y agoSuperhuman isn't an email marketing platform. From the article: > Superhuman’s competitors are Apple Mail, Gmail, and Outlook. Exactly zero of those companies insert a tracking pixel into their emails. Furthermore, both Outlook and iMessage use Read Receipts that are turned off by default and controlled completely by the receiving user. In other words, when you buy a new iPhone or start using Outlook, no one requesting an Outlook or iMessage read receipt can receive one without your explicit permission. Furthermore, even if you do turn those on, it’s a simple one-time receipt… not a log of times and geolocations every time the recipient views the message.
- philjohn 7y agoYep - I work on an email platform and tracking pixels are common. However, the ones I work on only record the time that a given email was opened ... BY DESIGN they do not include WHERE that email was opened, the IP address of the reader or anything else, because a) that's just creepy and b) it's not necessary to measure the impact of a given campaign.
- nfoz 7y agoRecording the time that an email is opened with a tracking pixel, is also creepy and not necessary. Stop it.
- asdf21 7y agoGood thing you're the final arbitrator of that, here to tell us how it is.
- AlexandrB 7y agoThe people you're sending these tracking pixels to should be the final arbitrators. So are you willing to have them reply yes/no to a form that says: "Do you wish to transmit the time at which you opened this email to $marketing_company". If not, why not?
- notus 7y agoDid you read the article? The author addresses this specifically. Justifying bad behavior with existing bad behavior is counterproductive.