Got an email from a bank saying my account has been put in a restricted state because they have been unable to reach me. Their emails reach me fine. They rarely send paper mail but when they do I can see that they have the correct address on file.
Then I looked closer at their email, examined the HTML, and found that they insert a tracker pixel in their messages. So if I were to use a graphical mail client with default configs, they would surreptitiously get a signal telling them my IP (thus whereabouts) and time of day every time I open my email from them. I use a text client so the tracker pixels get ignored.
Would a bank conclude from lack of tracker pixels signals that they are not reaching a customer, and then lock down their account?
I’m not going to call them and ask… fuck them for interrupting my day and making me dance. I don’t lick boots like that. I just wonder if anyone else who does not trigger tracker pixels has encountered this situation.
Can you explain why they would want to anonymise the tracker pixels? Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
One simple one is tracking how many people open an email. This is a really useful metric in of itself.
I did not think of the marketing angle – although even then, knowing the times that each individual opens their mail and their location has value for personalized marketing.
We are talking about banks in the case at hand. It’s unclear how many people have not come to the realization that bankers are now doing the job of cops. KYC/AML. In this particular sector, anonymization is unlikely. Banks have no limits on their snooping. They have a blank check and no consequences for overcollection. No restraint. When they get breached, they just sign people up for credit monitoring and any overcollection has the immunity of KYC law.
At best, perhaps a marketing division would choose some canned bulk mailing service which happens to give them low resolution on engagement. But even that’s a stretch because anyone in the marketing business also wants to market their own service as making the most of data collection.
I’ve done quite a bit of work implementing abandoned property analytics and escheatment processes at multiple large finance firms, and marketing engagement isn’t part of the criteria.
Banks want to keep your money at all costs, so even seeing that an email didn’t bounce back is enough of a sign of life to try to justify not escheating your assets to the state, which is part of the reason why marketing data isn’t part of the criteria.
I don’t think most do and for sure don’t trust them and block them.
But they’re also used to judge campaigns. You take a random, small subset of your mailing list, and a/b test by sending half one email and half a different email. The tracking pixels give you a good approximation of which gets more people to read it, and you use that headline for the rest of the list. You can also do the same thing just to generally keep an eye on what types of messages work best, etc.
But fuck them, I’m not giving up privacy I can protect.