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23 Comments

Email 'Spy Pixels' are Hyperbole

There's an ongoing discussion on the net about the use of 'spy pixels' in emails – basically how tracking opens and clicks is an invasion of personal privacy.

Much of it is fuelled by DHH on Twitter promoting his new email service.

I may be in the minority here, but I honestly fail to see a problem with it.

Calling it 'spying' is totally OTT. Email tracking is not used for malicious intent.

Tracking clicks/opens in emails provides feedback to the list owner about what content is resonating with their audience, and enables them to provide more valuable content in future.

The benefit is ultimately for the subscriber, not the list owner.

Now, I believe there is some middle ground where people can opt-in when they join a list. I personally am happy to provide feedback to list owners if it helps their business.

However, the Basecamp guys have been publicly shaming people for using tracking which is totally out of order IMO.

There will surely be many people on this site whose livelihood depends on email marketing and tracking performance helps them to improve their results. The Basecamp guys are totally disconnected from reality and seem to have forgotten where they themselves started out.

Shaming businesses on Twitter could be severely damaging to that business – who likely don't think they're even doing anything 'wrong'. Doing it in the current global climate when many businesses are on the verge of bankruptcy is disgusting.

Thoughts?

  1. 5

    "Email tracking is not used for malicious intent" - maybe not by you but it is by a multitude of senders. A few ruin it for everyone. Superhuman may not be forwarding your footprint to advertisers but I guarantee others are. Email should be private by default.

    1. -1

      This comment has been voted down. Click to show.

      1. 2

        Yes – but Superhuman was not doing this for lists, they were doing it for every email sent using their service. Receiving personal email is not something you can unsubscribe from.

  2. 2

    If open/click rates are the only way you can get feedback from your subscribers, then maybe you haven't really set yourself up for success.

    There are plenty of non-invasive signals you can use to detect what's resonating with your audience, and to be frank, open/click rates aren't a good one anyway.

    Customers who don't care shouldn't be effected by DHH's tweets or any other "shaming" going on. If customers care and you're fighting them, you're not listening.

    1. 1

      What other signals would you recommend? Obviously getting direct feedback from a subscriber is the best kind of feedback but it's not practical to expect or process this in every email sent out, especially for larger lists.

      The problem with DHH's tweets is that many people jump on the bandwagon without really thinking about the impact and it's largely a bias because Basecamp are profiting from this hype.

      It's great that Basecamp don't have to use open/click rates because they're so established and successful. It's different for someone just starting out in business.

      Hypocritically, Basecamp used tracking pixels themselves for years until recently 🙄

      1. 1

        I'm not a marketer, but as a customer/consumer, I've clicked links that said "let us know you liked this email!" I've clicked on links in emails that contained campaign identifiers. As someone who manages a newsletter, sub/unsub rates are an important piece of feedback. Replies/Tweets/Site visits. I think in more long-term trends, not 1-to-1 cause and effects. Then again, maybe that makes me bad at business.

        What I find compelling about DHH's argument is that it's a fundamentally moral one. Sans incentives, it's easy to explain to customers that businesses get to know when you read your email. If you find that creepy or if you care, (or if this puts you in harm's way, less we pretend 'creepy' is as bad as it gets), then don't engage with that business. Those who engage in open/click rate monitoring profit from the other side of this argument. This is what competition looks like.

        Also, I think DHH is really attacking larger companies who facilitate this practice, not Indie Hackers who think they're the ones really profiting from it.

        1. 1

          You're right – if recipients find it creepy or doesn't trust the sender, then the question must be ask as to why they remain on the list.

          I think DHH will attack whoever he feels like, without thinking of the repercussions.

          The other side of the coin is; Hey should be working WITH email service providers not shaming them and making enemies.

          It may be that ESPs just don't send emails to @hey.com addresses if it's going to cause so many issues. Which means having a @hey.com email address is pointless for most people.

  3. 2

    "People who make a living through spy pixels are very keen to keep this just a 'discussion', assume that everyone spying is really pure at heart. Defenses are 'preachy'. Ugh." - https://twitter.com/dhh/status/1248978928015826947

    Just checked, and yep!, you run a service to help people aggregate their spy pixel data. It's a bit deceptive of you to start this conversation framed as you being concerned about other people's businesses and subscribers, when you clearly have skin in the game on the opposite side of the table.

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      This comment has been voted down. Click to show.

  4. 2

    What started this discussion was Superhuman using tracking pixels in individual emails – not newsletters, but emails sent by one person to one other person, i.e. just a regular email. T
    he person sending the email then saw reports of when and where the receiver opened the email, each time they opened it.
    No-one expects this to happen when they receive a personal email.

    If you are using a platform with read receipts (like iMessage or WhatsApp) that is expected behaviour, and everyone knows that it is happening – and you can turn read receipts off if you want. What Superhuman was doing went against those expectations and norms, and was thus a privacy violation.

    That is what caused the controversy, and Superhuman disabled the feature.

    No-one really has a problem with newsletter software reporting aggregate opens and clicks. The problem arises when there is no expectation of tracking and the tracking is not disclosed.

    1. 0

      Tracking individual emails is a bit uncalled for, but I still don't believe it's the worst invasion of privacy, certainly not peepin through my windows level of 'spying'.

      1. 2

        Nobody said it’s “the worst invasion of privacy”, but it definitely is an invasion of privacy. Before Superhuman built it, that kind of feature didn’t exist in regular email clients, and goes against all reasonable expectations of how personal email should work.

        1. 0

          That's exactly what DHH has been implying:

          'If it's okay for me to spy on whether you open my email, why isn't it also okay for me to spy on when you take a shower...?'

          The two things are ludicrously disconnected.

          1. 1

            Kyle, do you believe it’s okay to record when and where someone opens a personal email every time they do so and show that information to the sender? It’s a simple question, yes or no?

            1. 0

              No, I don't believe it's ok to record it on personal email but I also don't think it's a huge invasion of privacy comparable to spying on me taking a shower.

              My issue with this whole thing is that newsletter owners who're trying to deliver content to their audience - for free, at the expense of their own time and money - are being demonised because another group of people are tracking when someone opens a personal email.

              Internet privacy logic regularly seems to be poorly thought through and seems to follow the reason of: a few people are using a tool for something bad, let's ban it for everyone!

  5. 2

    The Basecamp guys are totally disconnected from reality and seem to have forgotten where they themselves started out.

    I've been following this saga on Twitter and this was my exact first thought. The memory of sending my first subscriber-based email and seeing the opens will stay with me forever.

    Much of it is fuelled by DHH on Twitter promoting his new email service.

    Yeah, this makes me do the 🙄 - email tracking is evil, buy my service!

    Calling it 'spying' is totally OTT. Email tracking is not used for malicious intent.

    I don't think this is a universal truth. I've been caught masturbating in front of my computer hundreds of times, and had to pay my entire Bitcoin fortune in ransom because of it 🤣

    1. 1

      I don't think this is a universal truth. I've been caught masturbating in front of my computer hundreds of times, and had to pay my entire Bitcoin fortune in ransom because of it

      😂😂😂 but did they know your click through rate?

  6. 1

    I regularly have people use spy pixels in 1-on-1 emails with me, and those make me extremely uncomfortable. (Less-couth correspondents will send me followups with "hey I know you opened and read that email but haven't responded yet...")

    To claim that it's only marketers looking at the data in aggregate is missing a huge piece of DHH's point. There's a reason read receipts were part of email in the 90s but are now almost entirely unused.

  7. 1

    I agree. I also think that targeted advertising isn’t bad if used properly.

    Regarding email, a good compromise could be tracking opens and clicks but showing only aggregate data.

    1. 1

      I think most people will only be doing this anyway. I know some email tools do track per-user but the data is useless anyway. It's the overall % that matters.

      I'm surprised that people believe email marketers have time/desire to work through lists of thousands of people and check to see if each one individually opened their email.

  8. 1

    Plus one.

    My goodness, it is from a place of insane privilege to call it "spying" or even really "invasive."

    If you are actually being spied on -- let's say, having your email account attacked because you're a journalist in a repressive regime, or you are a Muslim in western China, or you are organizing resistance against a murderous dictator -- to call stat-gathering from your B2B photo-sharing SaaS "spying" is overly dramatic by an order of magnitude.

    1. 1

      100%

      The analogy DHH used was that spying on your email is just as bad as spying on you in the shower 😂

      I think the big issue is now that email marketers are being tarred as these evil, malicious spies, when in reality they're just trying to run a business and deliver useful content to their users.

  9. 0

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 0

      He created Ruby on Rails and is one of the founders of Basecamp, so he has a huge influence, which makes this whole thing unsettling.

      1. 0

        This comment was deleted a year ago.

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