I was out on a head-clearing walk anyway this evening as I waited for my computer to catch up with me on some batch processing work, so I figured I’d check on this cache, which got a DNF earlier today. The cache is in its
usual place and is healthy and ready to find… but the colours of some parts of the cache container might trick the eye when seen alongside all the recently fallen autumn leaves…
A few weeks ago, my credit card provider wrote to me to tell me that they were switching me back from paperless to postal billing because I’d “not been receiving their emails”.
This came as a surprise to me because I have been receiving their emails. Why would they think that I hadn’t?
This is a re-enactment but I promise the facial expression is pretty much right.
Turns out they have a tracking pixel in their email to track that it’s been opened, as well as potentially additional data such as when it was opened (or re-opened), what email client
or clients the recipient uses, what IP address or addresses they read their mail from, and so on.
“To protect your privacy from fucking creepy banks misusing features of HTML emails, Thunderbird has blocked remote content
in this message.” only tells half the story.
Do you have numbers on how many people opened a particular newsletter? Do you have numbers on how many people clicked a particular link?
You can call it data, or stats, or analytics, but make no mistake, that’s tracking.
Follow-on question: do you honestly think that everyone who opens a newsletter or clicks on a link in a newsletter has given their informed constent to be tracked by you?
Needless to say, I had words with my credit card provider. Paperless billing is useful to almost everybody but it’s incredibly useful for blind and partially-sighted users (who are also
the ones least-likely to have images loading in the first place, for obvious reasons) because your computer can read your communication to you which is much more-convenient
than a letter. Imagine how annoyed you’d be if your bank wrote you a letter (which you couldn’t read but had to get somebody else to read to you) to tell you that because you don’t
look at the images in their emails they’re not going to send them to you any more?
Even if you can somehow justify using tracking technologies (which don’t work reliably) to make general, statistical decisions (“fewer people open our emails when the subject
contains the word ‘overdraft’!”), you can’t make individual decisions based on them. That’s just wrong.
