Phone numbers leak more info than you might expect. They tell, based on country and area code, where the caller’s located—or at least where their phone number was registered. The caller’s name is likely to pop up on caller ID, and their carrier may be discoverable with a quick lookup. One could infer that the caller is awake and available at the time of the call. And if the callee answers, one can also infer that they are available—that they heard the call, saw the info, and decided to still take the time to talk.
When Caller ID was first introduced, the idea that you could know who was calling you was controversial.
“Caller ID poses invasion of privacy,” shouted the Chicago Tribune’s headline in 1990. “Ever since Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, there has been an expectation of privacy,” the piece argued (forgetting, apparently, the original human operators who originally connected phone calls, and the party lines that made eavesdropping all-too easy). “The contrivance of new technology cannot change that expectation. And a person should not be forced to give it up.”
Then came email.
I sent an email, and all I got was this referer data
Email itself is innocuous enough. An email address shares no more data than a phone number; at most you could guess the email address owner’s name and learn their workplace, educational institution, personal site, or preferred tech company from the domain.
Plain text is all that email requires. “The body of a message is simply lines of US-ASCII characters,” reads the RFC that defines email. Stick to that, and when you send an email you’ll only know if the message didn’t bounce. You’ll know nothing else about the person you emailed and if they ever read your message.
But something in us wants to know, wonders if an email still makes a “You’ve got mail!” sound if it falls in the digital forest and no one is there to hear it. “We just want people to get back to us,” as Stephanie Dubick wrote after digging into email tracking. “We want to be connected.” It feels nice to know someone opened your email, better still that they opened it repeatedly.
And that urge brings out the worse angels of our nature.
Email tracking centers around the simplest of things: Images. With first web mail apps like Hotmail (neé HoTMaiL, for HTML), HTML started creeping into messages, first as a way to add formatting and images, soon enough as a way to turn emails into tiny websites (something Google would later try to advance with AMP).
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