Who Should You Trust With Your Email?
We were happy to see the New York Times’ consumer technology columnist Brian X. Chen, in a recent consumer technology article, bring some much-needed attention to the issue of email tracking and email privacy. As we’ve been saying, it’s an issue that’s ripe for discussion, especially as the debate surrounding ad blocking rages on and advertisers begin to think about how to advertise effectively while respecting consumer privacy.
Mr. Chen’s experience with individuals tracking his emails to know when he read them — in much the same way that our founder was being tracked — demonstrates the dire need for an email untracking service. You can see from our website (if you scroll down a bit) that over 60% of the emails we have processed have contained email trackers of some kind. That’s a lot of trackers.
As Mr. Chen points out, hidden email trackers do have legitimate uses, such as measuring email newsletter readership and tailoring digital marketing campaigns (although some would disagree about the legitimacy of doing the latter without notice and consent). But that doesn’t change the fact that the current state of email tracking relies on such a blunt instrument, and that consumers don’t have the kind of notice and control they would expect to have in connection with similar practices conducted via a web browser.
People read their email across a whole host of email clients these days. They need a solution like Trackbuster that will work regardless of email client. Nobody should have to fiddle with email client settings and disable images to block trackers. It’s like solving crime by boarding up your windows and doors. There’s no need to accept a diminished email experience to ensure email privacy.
Email Access and Trust
One concern Mr. Chen raised in his article was that he’s trusting his emails to a relatively unknown company who he knows very little about. We understand that concern. So, in the next few weeks, we’ll be updating our About Us page to tell you a little more about our team.
It’s true that, in order for the Trackbuster service to work, you have to grant us limited access to your Gmail or Google Apps inbox. But you grant that access by using the Google-approved OAuth mechanism, and only grant access to emails, not other Google account information.
OAuth is a widely accepted and standard way for you to grant contingent access to a resource you own without having to provide the requesting entity your password. Instead, you give the requester, in essence, a unique key that you can remotely disable at any time. Most mainstream websites and services offer OAuth registration and login via either a social media account (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) or a Google account.
In terms of the permissions that we request, as you can see in the screenshot below, we do request the ability to view and manage your mail. But we take this responsibility seriously. As you can see in our privacy policy, email content is never stored anywhere on our servers — it is only scanned ephemerally in memory. Only a short list of Trackbuster engineers is authorized to access our email processing servers, and only under the narrowest set of conditions.
Granting third-party access to your Gmail account is now commonplace. For example, popular email clients like Dropbox’s Mailbox and Microsoft’s Outlook do it, as does the increasingly popular SaneBox service. In our research, we’ve found that many heavy email users have granted upwards of a dozen third-party apps access to their email messages on Gmail or Google Apps. Any developer that abused this permission would be shut down by Google. In any case, if you’re not comfortable with our having access, you can always deauthorize the app in your Google account from your account security page, as shown below.
We think asking consumers to trust that the hundreds of companies and individuals who are tracking your emails are doing the right thing with your email activity is asking too much. Instead, we are eager to prove ourselves worthy of your trust. We know you’re trusting us with one of the most important facets of your digital life — your email. And we know we have to earn and keep that trust. So, in addition to introducing the Trackbuster team, we’ll be saying a lot more in this space about our approach to user privacy and security.
We’re focused on educating consumers about email privacy and security, and putting that control back in the hands of consumers. Keep in mind that we’re still in limited beta; we’d rather get it right than rush something out the door. Right now, we’re working hard on some exciting new features that will make the service even more useful. Stay tuned.