The bug in the letter

Every so often, you’ll receive an email from someone — just a reg­ular message, not a newsletter, not the announce­ment of a BIG SALE — that is accompanied, in Gmail, by a familiar notice:

This is odd, though, because there appears to be no image in the email. Except, of course, there is: a single trans­parent tracking pixel, of the kind used ubiq­ui­tously in newslet­ters and sale announce­ments.

I as­so­ciate these emails with the client Super­human; maybe there are more that offer the same fea­ture. I want to state, for the record, that it is: not okay. The fea­ture both (1) sur­veils your correspondents, and (2) worse — yes, actu­ally worse — mechanizes them: treats them as “functions to be optimized” rather than human beings.

In the mar­keting context, I think this kind of data col­lec­tion is okay — barely — but only in the aggregate, i.e. to judge the overall per­for­mance of a newsletter. (I found Mailchimp’s desire to show me pre­cisely when a par­tic­ular sub­scriber opened a newsletter totally creepy, and I was glad to leave that fea­ture — that vision of the world — behind when I switched platforms.)

In the per­sonal context, it’s shock­ingly presumptuous. An email isn’t a letter, but even so: imagine unsealing a letter, and a winking elec­tronic transponder slips out. You would have ques­tions for your correspondent!

I’m not totally standoffish — I hap­pily use read receipts on my iPhone. Notice the difference: a fea­ture explic­itly acti­vated by both parties, with the col­lected “data”, such as it is, pre­sented front and center. An agree­ment between human beings.

Anyway, I wish Gmail offered an option less pas­sive than simply declining to dis­play the tracking pixel — maybe some way to send a fart sound streaming back into the sender’s inbox … with Super­human cc’d, of course.