Are you Being Tracked?

Recently, I wrote a post about my opinion on the ability of users to track their emails.  I think that allowing senders to essentially put a "read receipt" on emails that they have sent- without the receiver's knowledge- crosses boundaries of personal privacy.

After reading the original post, you could imagine my response when I stumbled across an application that allows you to track emails on your iPhone- "Mailtracker." Mailtracker works through the iPhone mail app and informs users of when their email has been read, where it was opened, how many times it was opened, how long it was viewed, and what type of device was used to read it.

So.. basically my worst email nightmare.  Not only does it disagree with my personal opinion of email privacy, but it infringes on other aspects of privacy, like location.  Personally, I don't want others to be able to identify exactly where I am, simply because I opened their e-mail.

However, there are instances when being able to determine a receivers location can be helpful.  For example. the original idea for the application stemmed from a scam that the co-founder avoided by identifying the location of the receiver of one of his email messages.  While I see the usefulness of a tool like Mailtracker in cases like this,  I think its creepiness outweighs its benefits.  

To divert attention away from this creepiness, Mailtracker markets towards the sender, not the receiver.  It employs the slogan "stop guessing, start knowing," which seems convincing- even to me. But it fails to address the receiver of an email from a Mailtracker user. 

I would love to know if my professor, who never responded to my email, had actually even opened it.  It would would be awesome to be able to tell if my resume had been viewed by a potential employer and for how long they had looked at it.  I would definitely prefer to have this knowledge instead of always wondering, but not at the expense of my own privacy.

If Mailtracker became a common tool, I would surely start to leave e-mails sitting in my inbox for extended periods of time.  I would have to wait until I was at an appropriate place and time to open them, and I would most likely feel obligated to respond immediately.  Not only would this be annoying for me, but because I'm constantly on the go, it would be extremely inconvenient.

Some may argue that this is just the next obvious step following the read receipt on iMessage.  The read receipt already allows you to see if others have viewed your message. But Mailtracker is not the next step, it is a major leap.  It taps into the location and engagement of the receiver, without letting them decide if they want the sender to know any of this information about them.  

Read receipt is okay, because you get to decide if others can know whether you have read their message or not. Mailtracker leaves the receiver with no control, while crossing new lines of individual privacy.

To learn more about MailTracker read this article that I found: http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/28/mailtracker-for-ios-brings-read-receipt-functionality-to-apples-default-mail-application/?ncid=rss