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Comment by 2T1Qka0rEiPr | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure I completely buy the "creepy" nature of this, or that everyone hates getting unsolicited emails - AFAIK this is a clear GDPR violation.

In my previous company we rewrote our checkout flow for this reason. Capturing emails and offering certain consumers discounts via emails after a few hours etc. was a successful move (given that a certain % of people will drop due to price sensitivity) - but GDPR removing that choice is a clearly a good thing for the majority who drop for other reasons.

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I can't remember which one, but a large shopping cart as a service provider does this (minus the discounts, or at least I didn't get them) for abandoned shopping carts where you've entered your email but didn't proceed to buy. Happened to me quite a few times because they only show shipping cost later on and they'd often be prohibitively expensive to ship to my country.

As for creepy: I wouldn't consider these creepy (i.e. where I've entered my email), but maybe annoying. I had the creepy experience with Pavlok when I first looked into getting one. Browsed around on their site but didn't put one into the cart. Hours later I get an email from them. Turns out they were using some service that loads a beacon and tries to connect the browser via various third party services to an email address. That was creepy. I still ended up buying a Pavlok though, but at a later time.

I think this is something that has become normalised and is no longer creepy, simply by virtue of how many stores do it.

If I abandon a basket in a retail store, I don't expect a phone call about it hours later after I've left the store and gone home. The first time an online-store followed up with an email about my abandoned basket, I stopped using that store.

Not naive enough to think other stores aren't tracking these metrics, but it's still creepy unless you've been subjected the obviousness of it a lot.

Hey! I'm the founder of Pavlok. That's odd -- I don't think we have a beacon of any sort doing that. You might have opted in on our discount offer, or if you added it to cart and began checkout it would know your email.

Very curious about your experience! Thanks.

Hey Maneesh, this was back in early 2015 (I bought my first one that summer), and all I remember was that it used some kind of marketing service that I had subsequently looked up to see that functionality since I was pretty freaked out at the time. Started me on thinking about the trails I leave on the web ;)

Good to see you're still around, I've enjoyed using my Pavlok quite a bit.

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