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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>For instance, sales people live and die in their email clients. One really useful feature for them is read tracking. You send an email to a prospect, that person quickly follows up saying they are not interested, but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification, you instantly take your phone and follow up. You win.

[...]

>Now, if the love letter author inserted a pixel tracker, they can know every single time you did go back to that email, and read it again and again. Not cool.

How is the first example any less creepy than the second example?

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>How is the first example any less creepy than the second example?

It's not. The whole concept of 'read receipts/tracking' in general, whether it's email or messaging or whatever is starting to get to me.

I've never actually heard of a positive use for them and I know they've personally caused me stress before as well as people I know and people's stories i've read.

I honestly can't see the desirability about a feature that allows you to see when others have read your message.

Even in your examples, they cause stress, the marketer and the love letter writer are stressed waiting, the person receiving the letter if they knew reads were being tracked would be stressed.

It really creates a strange conversation dynamic and the more communication methods that have it, the more uncomfortable I find communicating to be.

I'm the author, I totally agree.

Read tracking is very useful when you deal with people who don't check their email. I know some old people who "got hacked", and as a result they are scared of email and won't check it unless called and told of something important. (emailing semi-private pictures and directions is often useful)

Instead of using this creepy surveillance technique, how about calling them to ask if they read your email?

"Telephone anxiety", is a thing, as I've come to learn recently about some of my cohorts when I'd ask this very question:

"did you call and ask this person for the follow-up you're claiming they haven't given you in three days?"

I had no clue-now I'm not going to press the matter and push the person into it, yet at the same time here we're sitting on a decision being left open by one person, and not being acted on at all by another.

Makes for some interesting manager decisions, it does.

Telephone anxiety is easy to create.

Take a kid, who has a phone, and a peer group with elaborate customs around using it, which include never, ever calling someone without texting first. Maybe your best friend and main squeeze, as a special privilege.

Then the parent insists the child pick up the phone whenever they call. Also, there are spam calls, and the occasional genuine emergency.

Presto, the phone ringing is automatically Bad News, and as the child grows to adulthood, they associate phone calls with trouble, and subconsciously feel like an aggressive, bad person, if they have to make one.

And they're right.

Phone calls are, after all, even more aggressively demanding that someone else's attention be, right now, dedicated to dealing with you than any tracker.

Then the parent insists the child pick up the phone whenever they call. Also, there are spam calls, and the occasional genuine emergency

Coming from someone who had a parent who liked to LIE (yes, straight up bold faced lie) about there being a “family emergency” because I didn’t answer each and every single phone call they made fast enough (surprise, teenage me had a job and I couldn’t just stop making pizzas because dad wanted another check-in) I completely empathize

The reason is that it increases expectations without a concurrent increase in agency.

People tend to describe this dynamic as "always-connected" or something similar, but that verbiage really just scratches the surface of the underlying mechanics. At it's heart, it's all about trying to increasingly make "your time" into "my time", and that's not fair if you go back to our basic assumptions about what makes us human and why freedom is important.

Almost every dystopian sci-fi novel includes the theme of humans in some way being enslaved to machines, and this dynamic is the beginning of just such a thing. Here, the machine is not yet a machine but rather another person, but the outcome is the same; it starts to become a form of "attention slavery".

It makes me think about how we see this sort of thing actually becoming possible with YouTube. Soon algorithms will be able to create stuff that will be sufficiently entertaining. Dreadful.

I mean, I've already spent nearly half an hour looking at zooming into the mandelbrot fractal. But... that's different...

> I honestly can't see the desirability about a feature that allows you to see when others have read your message.

When placing an order via email it's really useful to get an automatic confirmation that the order has been read.

Does this even work for most clients, e.g. gmail and outlook? My understanding is gmail preloads the images (aka pixels) to their server before you even open. And outlook will cache the image after the first open so it won't fire back to the server after that.

You can also tell Gmail not to open images at all until you hit a button saying so

If they really cared, they'd made it simple to default to showing images from people in your contacts, and not otherwise.

However, because they're in bed with the advertisers, they make it so you either choose a degrading email experience for all your emails, or allow yourself to be tracked.

This comment misses the mark a bit. Gmail actually competes with spam emailers - then run their own ads inside your inbox and would rather you click on those. They also sort promotions and spam out of your primary inbox pretty robustly.

Working in a large corporation I can confirm that it doesn't work. Outlook blocks all images and external content by default. There is a button somewhere to unlock the email but you'd never click that for spam.

Most users here wouldn't, but plenty of enterprise users do. And also have active content allowed if not explicitly denied by a GPO.

I thought that too, but just looked talked with a user of an email marketing program and she is getting read notifications from her own Gmail account right after she opens it when testing (and lots in production). I think what Gmail does is they load the images from their server the first time you open the email and cache then for later views.

Gmail just proxies the image which protects your IP address. Marketers can still see whether you opened the email unless you have images disabled.

Yeah I was referring to a time shift (and caching). Good point about the ip

"but 3 months later, they reopen that same email, you get a live read notification"

It doesn't work for gmail users. Tracking pixel will only be fired the first time the email is opened. After that, images will be served via google proxy servers.

Source: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html

I doubt they'd cache an image for 3 months or longer.

nope, not sure about the gmail proxy servers but you get alerts everytime user opens the mail. speaking from first hand experience.

That happens if email is opened via clients like Thunderbird. For gmail, image will be served via google proxy servers.

What is the cache time for said proxy servers? Does it follow content expiration rules?

In my tests using Gmail website, I see the read receipts right away.

Do you see them the second or third time you open the mail?

When the situation is more personal, it's harder to suppress the cognitive dissonance of invading someone's personal space (their email client). By adding the business context, it's easier to justify it as likely being a work only email account, etc.

> How is the first example any less creepy than the second example?

Love is a much more personal and private topic than a b2b capital expense.

Yeah holy shit I was immediately struck by how creepy that first example was.

Well, mostly because many of us want the guy to reach out to us most of the time in the first case. I respond to practically every email quite rapidly and for ones I'm not interested in I just push it off. At some later time, I might need the sales guy at short notice and I always reach out to the same guy. Or maybe I just want to cultivate a link so that I have the connection later so I give him the lead when I would otherwise go random.

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