, 2004-07-29
As if the common use of "web bugs" inside spam was not enough, companies are using new techniques to watch and track the private emails you read, forward, print, and more.
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Email Privacy is Lost
2004-07-30
Matthew Murphy (1 replies)
Matthew Murphy (1 replies)
Email Privacy is Lost
2005-12-14
Anonymous (1 replies)
Anonymous (1 replies)
Unfortunately as email is so widely abused with spam, viruses and social engineering, the power needs to be with the recipient, not the sender.
If you are a legitimate businessman that would like to know if your email 'parcel' arrived then your request should be performed openly. "Please copy and paste this link into your browser so that I know you have received my email". You could make it worthwhile to potential customers by offering free bonuses. At least the customer has the 'right' in such a case to not give you a receipt to 'potentially' unsolicited email.
It the recipient decides not to do that, then it is just bad luck for the sender.
I object strongly to my email address being sold and resold to mass marketers and receiving unsolicited email and viruses, and these forms of 'tracking' emails makes it just too easy for them to do so.
The ideal in my opinion would be "Email Contact Zones" similar to Internet zones but by contact address for received email only. The recipient could place your contact into the "Highly Trusted (aka allow receipts) area" if they so chose. Unfortunately that does not exist, so as a recipient I would rather read everything in plain text, and if a marketer tries to force me to read html, then too bad for them, as I will not and the marketer will probably be blacklisted.
So as a businessman I would hope that you respect the rights of potential customers and not 'turn them away' by arrogance and feeling that you have or should have any rights to spy on what people read or otherwise do on their computers.
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Link to this comment: http://www.securityfocus.com/comments/columns/258/33135#33135