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shannon_aThe Internet has ever been a breeding ground for the unethical and the amoral. The newest privacy snoops to try and make a name for themselves are the dogs at didtheyreadit.com, a Florida company based on the concept of stalking your friends and neighbors through email.
DTRI.com offers a service, they proclaim, which will tell you if your e-mail gets read, for how long, and where in the world the person reading the mail is. I won't even try and get into the many and scary privacy issues this creates.
This is done by what's called a "tracking graphic". Your scummy stalker sends the email they want tracked to a special .didtheyreadit.com address, and the company then inserts a HTML link to a tiny 1x1 graphic into the mail. Thus, when you open the e-mail, the graphic is downloaded off the web, and they know you've read it. Beyond that, they do their best to stall the download of the image. Since your mail client will keep trying to download that graphic as long as your e-mail is open, they have some measure of how long you read. Finally, they look at the IP address which requested the graphic, and do their best to track down where it's geographically located (which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't).
Voila! When. How long. From where.
There's an easy solution to avoid being stalked and tracked: turn off the download of HTML images in your mail client. In Eudora I did this through Tools->Options->Display. I'm sure other clients have similar methods. This means that you won't get to see downloadable HTML graphics of NEKKID GRLLZ in your client any more, but that's probably not a huge loss, and the whole issue of downloaded HTML images has been a potential privacy issue for a long time (for a while there have been rumors that spammers use tracking graphics to measure if an e-mail address is live for spam receipt).
I read through this company's FAQ, and was amused to see one question about whether spyware was installed on your computer when you signed up for their service (No, of course not), and another about whether they read your emails (For the love of God, we'd never do that). I think the fact that they thought to ask these questions says a lot; anyone who trusts their private correspondence to a company with this little in the way of ethics is just asking for it.
Here's the slashdot story.
DTRI.com offers a service, they proclaim, which will tell you if your e-mail gets read, for how long, and where in the world the person reading the mail is. I won't even try and get into the many and scary privacy issues this creates.
This is done by what's called a "tracking graphic". Your scummy stalker sends the email they want tracked to a special .didtheyreadit.com address, and the company then inserts a HTML link to a tiny 1x1 graphic into the mail. Thus, when you open the e-mail, the graphic is downloaded off the web, and they know you've read it. Beyond that, they do their best to stall the download of the image. Since your mail client will keep trying to download that graphic as long as your e-mail is open, they have some measure of how long you read. Finally, they look at the IP address which requested the graphic, and do their best to track down where it's geographically located (which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't).
Voila! When. How long. From where.
There's an easy solution to avoid being stalked and tracked: turn off the download of HTML images in your mail client. In Eudora I did this through Tools->Options->Display. I'm sure other clients have similar methods. This means that you won't get to see downloadable HTML graphics of NEKKID GRLLZ in your client any more, but that's probably not a huge loss, and the whole issue of downloaded HTML images has been a potential privacy issue for a long time (for a while there have been rumors that spammers use tracking graphics to measure if an e-mail address is live for spam receipt).
I read through this company's FAQ, and was amused to see one question about whether spyware was installed on your computer when you signed up for their service (No, of course not), and another about whether they read your emails (For the love of God, we'd never do that). I think the fact that they thought to ask these questions says a lot; anyone who trusts their private correspondence to a company with this little in the way of ethics is just asking for it.
Here's the slashdot story.
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Date: 2004-05-24 05:00 pm (UTC)P.S. For other email clients, possible steps to finding a way to turn on and off this option are Options>Preferences>
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