Bernie is Watching You and You and You
I couldn't stop the Kucinich Campaign from using 1x1 tracking gifs in their mailings -- granted, the real "web suavey brain trust" was the morons at Kintera, who will gladly stuff tracking gifs in advocacy mailings to protect the privacy of end-user email, but I digress.
... <CENTER>Sanders for Senate<BR> P.O.Box 391<BR> Burlington, VT 05402</CENTER></FONT><img id="trackingimage" src="http://images.myngp.com/NGPClientData3~~/img1803768.gif" height=1 width=1 border=0>It is hard to be consistent. If I were back in Abenaki Country I'd threaten to smack him with lake trout unless he cleans up his ask mail.
It wouldn't hurt if his idiotic email house used text email too.
The way this works, If I forward the mail to you, and you use an HTML-enabled mail reader (bad idea), then Bernie has my time and ip address of reading (except I don't ever use an HTML-enabled mail reader), and now he has yours too. Rinse and Repeat.
"I rise to take a piss on the NSA, but first I'm going to wet my leg and fill my left shoe."
Comments
What's wrong with a tracking email? Violation of privacy? About every advocacy email I get has a tracking picture included.
Nothing compared to that phone-tapping, data-mining operation of the Bushies.
Plus, I would think tracking response rates and open times would be very useful for a campaign... what's the core objection you have?
Posted by: Ryan | August 11, 2006 11:02 AM
what's the core objection you have?
Oh, I suppose having written the bits of the P3P spec most applicable to covert data collection payload in data transported by means other than the obvious HTTP methods may have something to do with it.
You can't have any objections to my asking my friends at GWI to let me know what user was assigned 207.5.168.178 at 11:02am EDT on August 11th. All URLs fetched to (routes originating from) that address during its assignment to some MAC address. All URLs fetched to address to which that MAC address has been assigned for as deep as GWI keeps records. All SMTP envelope data for email queued for, and delivered to, that address (that addresses to which ...). No. I really don't care about you or your data, just as you obviously don't about your privacy either.
Posted by: ebw | August 12, 2006 08:05 PM