Do Not Track. It’s not so hard!
We keep hearing email service providers saying that they don’t support the W3C standard “Do Not Track” (DNT) setting available in many browsers. Why this is varies, but the excuse is usually along the lines of “nobody can decide what it means, and it’s awfully ambiguous, so we’re going to ignore it and track everybody anyway”. Fortunately we are able to see through this doublespeak and translate this into their real justification: “we don’t like the idea of not being able to exploit subscribers at every opportunity, so we’re going to play dumb and pretend we don’t know what it means”. This is often paired with a wilful misapprehension of GDPR and EPD to annoy and intimidate with passive-aggressive cookie consent pop-ups (which you won’t find on our sites because we don’t need them). The W3C (the nice people that write the standards for the web) even wrote a clarifying article about DNT and GDPR.
We do things differently at Smartmessages. We look at the “Do Not Track” setting provided by visitors’ browsers and treat it as an indication that we should (and this may come as a shock to some) not track their activities. Was that so hard?