Privacy and tracking

“I can’t believe you are wearing one of those,” they said while sneering at the Pebble watch I was wearing. Yes, that’s how someone introduced themselves to me at a conference last year. Apparently, I’m not allowed to wear smartwatches, or something. It wasn’t clear what their problem was or why they thought that was a good opening line. Best I can figure, it was some commentary on the hypocrisy of me wearing a smartwatch and claiming to be pro-privacy.

The thing is, I think I’m aware of how much information is out there about me, although I’m pretty convinced there’s even more than I think there is. The decisions we make about privacy and tracking are complicated. Do I take this 5% discount on something in return for having my purchases tracked? Do I participate in Facebook knowing they’re compiling a full dossier on me? Do I stay logged into Google? Does any of that matter?

We’re watched by corporations and they know a lot about us and what we do. Loyalty cards are ubiquitous and they’re purchase tracking devices. Many apps track us and send that data back to companies. Half of Palo Alto office space has been taken over by a secretive company called Palantir that is built on tracking and profiling people. Tracking is a fact of life.

Online we’re tracked all the time. Even if we try and avoid it, if we participate in almost anything online we’re tracked. In many cases, this is taken as implicit consent to be tracked. Being a part of a community we enjoy or using services that benefit us come with the price of tracking.

Many people don’t really understand how ubiquitous tracking is. I’m sure I don’t, and I believe everything I do is tracked somewhere by someone.
I pointed out earlier this week that the company Unroll.me was using the access they had to consumer mailboxes to sell data they extracted from emails. I also pointed out there are other companies with access to mailboxes and that many email marketers are the target market for the data they’re selling.

Return Path commented on my post and clarified how transparent they attempt to be in their various data products. I’m sure they are, I know a lot of the folks at Return Path and I trust them. But that doesn’t scale. I can’t personally know the executives at every company I do business with and trust they’re not out to invade my privacy.

It’s a fact that the modern lifestyle includes tracking. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to apps and what access they have. But it does mean if we want to fully participate and have access we need to accept the price is some privacy invasion and tracking. What unroll.me did might be unexpected, but it’s not unusual.

Related Posts

March 2016: The Month In Email

Happy April! I’m just back from the EEC conference in New Orleans, which was terrific. I wrote a quick post about a great session on content marketing, and I’ll have more to add about the rest of the conference over the next week or so. Stay tuned!
March2016_blog
Here’s a look at what caught our attention in March:
On the DMARC front, we noted that both Yahoo and mail.ru are moving forward with p=reject, and Steve offered some advice for ESPs and software developers on methods for handling this gracefully. I also answered an Ask Laura question about making the decision to publish DMARC. Look for more on that in this month’s Ask Laura questions…
Our other Ask Laura question this month was about changing ESPs, which senders do for many reasons. It’s useful to know that there will generally be some shifts in deliverability with any move. Different ESPs measure engagement in different ways, and other issues may arise in the transition, so it’s good to be aware of these if you’re contemplating a change.
In industry news, I wrote a sort of meta-post about how the Internet is hard (related: where do you stand on the great Internet vs. internet debate? Comment below!) and we saw several examples of that this month, including a privacy debacle at Florida State University. Marketing is hard, too. I revisited an old post about a fraud case where a woman sued Toyota over an email marketing “prank”. As always, my best practices recommendation for these sorts of things (and everything else!) really boils down to one thing: send wanted email.
Steve wrote extensively about SPF this month in two must-read posts, where he explained the SPF rule of ten and how to optimize your SPF records. He also wrote about Mutt, the much-loved command line email client, and marked the passing of industry pioneer Ray Tomlinson, who, in addition to his many accomplishments, was by all accounts a very thoughtful and generous man.
Finally, I occasionally like to take a moment and follow the twisty paths that lead to my spam folder. Here’s a look at how Ugg spams my email doppelganger, MRS LAURA CORBISHLEY. In other spam news, there’s a lot of very interesting data in the recent 10 Worst list from Spamhaus. Take a look if you haven’t seen it yet.

Read More

Electronic records outside US not covered by US warrants

The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the Government today in US Government vs. Microsoft. The government is investigating a drug dealer and want access to records held by Microsoft. Microsoft turned over metadata stored on US machines. But they refused to turn over the specific emails stored on machines in Dublin. The company’s position is that the federal government needs to follow the rules of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty between the US and Ireland.
This has been winding its way through the appeals court.
The court’s ruling today states “§ 2703 of the Stored Communications Act does not authorize courts to issue and enforce against U.S.‐based service providers warrants for the seizure of customer e‐mail content that is stored exclusively on foreign servers.”
An interesting ruling, and I see pros and cons to the ruling. It does complicate anti-spam enforcement a bit and make it easier for criminals to hide their data overseas while they might be in the US. But it’s already easy for them to do that. Many arrests of spam gangs and others for crimes committed on the Internet over email involve multiple law enforcement agencies across the world.
Full text of the ruling (.pdf link)

Read More

FCC notice of proposed rulemaking

The FCC recently published a notice of proposed rulemaking that will have an impact on how we fight abuse on the internet. M3AAWG has submitted a comment on the proposal (pdf link). All submissions can be found on the FCC website.

Read More