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from the dont-track-me-while-i'm-tracking-you dept.
wired runs this story on how 'email open' tracking is becoming more ubiquitous than someone would like
"I JUST CAME across this email," began the message, a long overdue reply. But I knew the sender was lying. He’d opened my email nearly six months ago. On a Mac. In Palo Alto. At night.
I knew this because I was running the email tracking service Streak, which notified me as soon as my message had been opened.
...
There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company that also builds anti-tracking tools.
The tech is pretty simple. Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts.
...
But lately, a surprising—and growing—number of tracked emails are being sent not from corporations, but acquaintances. “We have been in touch with users that were tracked by their spouses, business partners, competitors,” says Florian Seroussi, the founder of OMC. “It's the wild, wild west out there.”
According to OMC's data, a full 19 percent of all “conversational” email is now tracked.
I STUMBLED UPON the world of email tracking last year, while working on a book about the iPhone and the notoriously secretive company that produces it. I’d reached out to Apple to request some interviews, and the PR team had initially seemed polite and receptive. We exchanged a few emails. Then they went radio silent. Months went by, and my unanswered emails piled up. I started to wonder if anyone was reading them at all.
That’s when, inspired by another journalist who’d been stonewalled by Apple, I installed the email tracker Streak. It was free, and took about 30 seconds. Then, I sent another email to my press contact. A notification popped up on my screen: My email had been opened almost immediately, inside Cupertino, on an iPhone. Then it was opened again, on an iMac, and again, and again. My messages were not only being read, but widely disseminated
...
I wrote Cook a lengthy email detailing the reasons he should join me for an interview. When I didn’t hear back, I drafted a brief follow-up, enabled Streak, hit send. Hours later, I got the notification: My email had been read. Yet one glaring detail looked off. According to Streak, the email had been read on a Windows Desktop computer.
...
IF TIM COOK is a closet Windows user (who knows! Maybe his Compaq days never fully rubbed off) or even if he outsources his email correspondence to a firm that does, then it’s a fine example of the sort of private data email tracking can dredge up even on our most powerful public figures.
...
"During the 2016 election, we sent a tracked email out to the US senators, and the people running for the presidency," Seroussi says. "We wanted to know, were they doing anything about tracking? Obviously, the answer was no. We typically got the location of their devices, the IP addresses; you could pinpoint almost exactly where they were, which hotels they were staying at."
Time to get back to Pine.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @12:16PM (4 children)
I don't like the label 'M$', I think it's childish.
That said, at work we had to switch for Google Apps for business (I forget the formal name) to Office 365 and... damn does Outlook suck. I think it's the best advertisement for GMail that anyone could invent.
Consumers are weird, they prefer kitchen sinks that work.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:25PM (2 children)
Funny, because no child today remembers back when Microsoft was loved for their BASIC, even though it limited variable names to two characters and everyone used one character most of the time, with an extra character at the end indicating the type: % for integer, $ for string or nothing for float.
If you started with A$ and went B$, C$... your 13th variable would be M$.
This was in the "good old days" of Commodore, before Microsoft became hated for killing any company that had a better product than them, and BASIC was loved by every kid who used their home computer for more than gaming. Though many of us never heard of Microsoft, because BASIC was licensed to the computer manufacturers without any requirements to show the Microsoft name.
The M$ abbreviation for Microsoft has nothing to do with dollars, as people too young to know history often think. To criticize Microsofts business strategies, MSFT is the abbreviation to use.
SYS 64738
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @03:40PM (1 child)
Everything you said is correct, except for the statement about M$ not being about dollars. Your memory is apparently getting faulty if you don't recall that coming into effect to denigrate Microsoft for their monopolistic and anti-competitive practices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 19 2017, @04:33PM
agreed:
m$ is for "your universal copy machine (tho only electrical and digital) cannot be a universal copy machine (unless you pay)".
the $ is the DOLLAR sign ... any maybe it is also used in some programming language .. na done can ask, if the programming language itself allows to define the symbol to define a variable? maybe if you PAY?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 20 2017, @08:49AM
> I don't like the label 'M$', I think it's childish.
You must be new here. When web forums were a relatively new phenomenon M$ had its own search engine to key into the presence of the string 'microsoft' anywhere in a reply. If you used the string, shills woud turn up within minutes and find ways to drag the whole thread down, if necessary by simply repeatedly copy-pasting gayness and coprophilia. If you used just about any obfuscation, such as M$, the discussion could carry on in peace and often be quite productive.
No movement has caused more damage to industry and even society at large than M$. The string 'M$' bothers the shills these days because it is a reminder of that ongoing unethical and sometime illegal behavior. The shills are working hard to cover that up and revise history. That asshole, Bill himself, spends hundreds of millions of dollars per year on reputation management to try to hide both the past and the present from gullible chumps. Pretending that use of the tag 'M$' is childish is part of that and they hope to gain traction with that idea.