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Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

jacquescorbytuech.com

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Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#131

Post by 0xfaded »

GPDR missed a massive opportunity to standardize encrypted email. Instead we're now stuck with crappy 3rd party "secure mail" systems.

I have a startup in Denmark, and the incubator we're part of applied for an EU funding scheme. The bureaucracy for these programs is out of control, and there are claims out there that 90% of state innovation funding is blown on administration.

Long story short, I had to fill out some timesheets, and because of GDPR print out the sheets filling in everything except the personally identifying information, and then fill the rest of them out with a PEN.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#132

Post by iamacyborg »

ti_ranger wrote: post #121
iamacyborg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think email marketers think they encompass the entirety of the email industry, I was writing that article from the perspective of being an email marketer proposing something to my peers, ie others in the industry.

The article title, "Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem", implies that. Either you do think email marketing comprises the entire industry, or the article title (and HN submission) are (or give the impression of) clickbait. At least it doesn't seem you are doing any direct tracking on the post though ... (I used to work for an ISP with a pretty large email service, so it touches nerves that were exposed when…

I think you might have a bit of a bias in this instance though, given your confessed work history.

This is something I wish ISP's took more care of, they could easily protect users by blocking image loading by default and warning users when links in emails are tracked, for example.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#133

Post by pteraspidomorph »

clinta wrote: post #115
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an european who rejects ad trackers on every website, I can confirm that a good 95% of them are correctly implemented and will let you keep browsing. Some of them (usually americans with a poor understanding of why they even implemented that) will kick you out or ask you again on every page load until you accept. We need a standard for managing these controls on the browser side, which major browsers can then impl…

How does that work anyway? If you decline to allow the site to store a cookie on your machine, how does the site know that you already rejected the popup to avoid showing it to you on your next action?

They store that information on a cookie! Some websites try to break their own permission manager on purpose (or at least I can only imagine it's on purpose) by burying the cookie that stores the permission manager's settings within the list of cookies you have to accept or reject, so if you "reject all" you will be asked again and again. Non malicious implementations either include the permission manager among the essential cookies or list it at the very top so you can choose to keep it.

If the permissions were managed by the browser then cookies could be managed directly on the client side without server side interference, and preferences could be communicated to the website via headers (like DNT but GDPR requires a lot more granularity, and is also legally enforceable in the EU).

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#134

Post by danaris »

ses1984 wrote: post #95
martin_a wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever clicked one of those? I've never been sure if that wouldn't have worsened the situation by giving feedback that this is an active mail address managed by somebody.

If it's from a legitimate company in American jurisdiction they are legally obligated to stop sending emails if you click unsubscribe. I suppose that piece of information has some nonzero value that you are giving up in exchange to not be contacted by that company. If you filter just a single address that address can change. If you filter their domain you might lose legitimate correspondence.

I’ve had several groupings of unsolicited marketing emails over the years where I’ve clicked Unsubscribe and ended up on what’s very clearly a Totally Not That Email List, Honest...but it’s advertising the same things, in the same way, just from a slightly different email and possibly different company name. They have all been American in origin.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#135

Post by mnw21cam »

amelius wrote: post #51
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an european who rejects ad trackers on every website, I can confirm that a good 95% of them are correctly implemented and will let you keep browsing. Some of them (usually americans with a poor understanding of why they even implemented that) will kick you out or ask you again on every page load until you accept. We need a standard for managing these controls on the browser side, which major browsers can then impl…

> We need a standard for managing these controls on the browser side, which major browsers can then implement. Like the "Do Not Track" header field? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Track Perhaps it will work if introduced as a GDPR header field.

That is a good point. If my browser is sending a do not track header, why is your server even asking me how much tracking I want?

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#136

Post by giancarlostoro »

cptskippy wrote: post #116
giancarlostoro wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what kills me about web developers of 2017-2019 (maybe farther back to 2015 or 2016?). We had this awesome hype about supporting mobile resolutions with CSS years ago but now it seems like nobody accounts for the various screen form factors available when designing websites. Like those sites with the overly huge logos that look ridiculous and annoying on 1080p but I'm sure on 2k and higher they look fine. I d…

Everything is mobile first these days We had to write a line of business app used by office staff opening mail to feed high speed scanners to support mobile first with a responsive design.

What worries me more is that, it's not always mobile first either. Sometimes it's just 4K first.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#137

Post by mnw21cam »

vectorEQ wrote: post #48
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an european who rejects ad trackers on every website, I can confirm that a good 95% of them are correctly implemented and will let you keep browsing. Some of them (usually americans with a poor understanding of why they even implemented that) will kick you out or ask you again on every page load until you accept. We need a standard for managing these controls on the browser side, which major browsers can then impl…

i don't think its a problem that people don't let you use the site if you don't opt-in. thats a design choice, not a fault or problem or bad implementation. just a show of that they would really really like to track you. if you don't want to be tracked, then it's a clear indicator to avoid such site in the future. I wholeheartedly agree on your point though, that if i reject 'A' on one site, it could be assumed by th…

> i don't think its a problem that people don't let you use the site if you don't opt-in. thats a design choice

It's illegal. End of.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#138

Post by pteraspidomorph »

barrkel wrote: post #118
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very pleasant on QHD. I agree that they probably should have a different sheet for lower resolutions.

In principle, using resolution-independent units like points should be fine; it's using px instead of pt that leads to problems. (And the site is using px; it shouldn't.)

As a web developer in the past I found - though maybe that has changed in recent years, let me know if that is the case - there aren't any real resolution-independent units you can use to design an interface that is comfortable on every medium. You can peg your design to things like viewport width or font size, but you always end up having to make an arbitrary decision at some point, because there is no way for the web browser to know the physical dimensions of the screen the webpage is actually being displayed on. You have to make educated guesses based on the relationship between width and height, user agent and other headers, stuff like that, and create different stylesheets for each case. The style for the 1920x1080 screen (rotated horizontally) of the smallest smartphones can't have the same font size as the style of a 1920x1080 30 inch desktop monitor.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#139

Post by mnw21cam »

rypskar wrote: post #68
CrLf wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Browsing the web in Europe is like experiencing the rebirth of the pop-up ads era. And this by itself says a lot, but not what people usually think it says. In fact, you don't need any kind of cookie popups _unless_ they're tracking cookies. Any reasonable use of cookies for site-specific reasons (authentication, session, csrf, load-balancing, settings) is already allowed with no need to opt-in[1]. The reason why c…

So much this. Every time I see a popup with "We respect your privacy", I think "no you don't" and try to see if it is something I can block in privacy badger to remove the popup. If the site respect users privacy it will not track the users and don't need the warning

More accurate - "We value your privacy".

In other words, your privacy has value to them, and they are eager to shaft you that privacy to extract the value.

Re: Dear Email Industry, We’ve Got a GDPR Problem

#140

Post by tiborsaas »

martin_a wrote: post #111
tiborsaas wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But so much of that tracking isn't really necessary. I've just launched my e-commerce platform and I see 34 unique visitors and no sales. Analytics is key to figure out if something is wrong and I'm not talking about the code. > I'd rather focus on making my product better. How do you make it better? Having numbers without analyzing user engagement is shooting in the dark with a shotgun.

> How do you make it better? How about asking? What about some live chat to gather information? We have found this to be highly valuable for our shop(s). It automatically pops up after 30 seconds on a product page, on other pages the badge is always present. Lot of good chats, lots of "I'm looking for XY"-feedback that helped us improve.

They are not substitutes. It's one thing what users say they do or want and another what they actually do.
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