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> "Thanks for opening this email. We’ve logged that you read it, we’ll log again next time you open the email. We know where you’re located, and what device you

by gwd 6y ago

> "Thanks for opening this email. We’ve logged that you read it, we’ll log again next time you open the email. We know where you’re located, and what device you’re on. We’re using this information to tweak our emails to get you to open and read more of our emails in the future" Nice

Spivak 6y ago
I think the paragraph after it kinda undermines their thesis though. There's nothing meaningfully different about an email and a website. They're both documents that you render locally on your client. The delivery mechanism doesn't really matter. You would probably find it really weird that a NYT article archive HTML page you have on your machine still tracks you because you client runs the JS if it wasn't already the norm. But then why does downloading that same document on-demand change your expectation of being tracked? Or if we were in a alternate universe where web pages were hyperlinked PDFs I bet you would find it odd that opening one in Acrobat sends all your interactions to some server somewhere. It's fine that by convention we have some places where it's not kosher to track people but we at least have to admit that the distinction is arbitrary and that being upset about email tracking but not website tracking is inherently inconsistent. Because sure you can name differences between emails and websites but nothing really fundamental.
- mijamo 6y ago
  It is fundamentally different because when I track and email I know who I'm tracking and I will look at the data on and individual basis. For instance "great, that client has opened my contract email 5 times. Means they are interested.I can adapt my negotiating position based on that". For websites I would look as the data in aggregate. Sure that aggregation can be pretty precise but still it is not on the personal level. I suppose technically speaking you could checks the individual use of a website for logged in users but even Google Analytics is very explicit on hat not being OK for instance, and there is no UI for it in any tool that I know.

by gwd 6y ago

Spivak 6y ago

I think the paragraph after it kinda undermines their thesis though. There's nothing meaningfully different about an email and a website. They're both documents that you render locally on your client. The delivery mechanism doesn't really matter. You would probably find it really weird that a NYT article archive HTML page you have on your machine still tracks you because you client runs the JS if it wasn't already the norm. But then why does downloading that same document on-demand change your expectation of being tracked? Or if we were in a alternate universe where web pages were hyperlinked PDFs I bet you would find it odd that opening one in Acrobat sends all your interactions to some server somewhere. It's fine that by convention we have some places where it's not kosher to track people but we at least have to admit that the distinction is arbitrary and that being upset about email tracking but not website tracking is inherently inconsistent. Because sure you can name differences between emails and websites but nothing really fundamental.

mijamo 6y ago
It is fundamentally different because when I track and email I know who I'm tracking and I will look at the data on and individual basis. For instance "great, that client has opened my contract email 5 times. Means they are interested.I can adapt my negotiating position based on that". For websites I would look as the data in aggregate. Sure that aggregation can be pretty precise but still it is not on the personal level. I suppose technically speaking you could checks the individual use of a website for logged in users but even Google Analytics is very explicit on hat not being OK for instance, and there is no UI for it in any tool that I know.