E-mail Fly Swatting
Like you, I get a lot of junk e-mail. And (hopefully like you), I've set up filters and employed anti-spam programs to at least cut down the flow of useless, space-eating and bandwidth-wasting messages for stuff I wouldn't dream of getting in a million years. Using these methods, at least some of the spam ends up in the trash bin before it even gets onto the computer.
But there's another category of spam - let's call it 'voluntary spam.' This is junk e-mail you get after signing up for a service or a download. The bargain is you get a good deal on something, and they get your e-mail address so they can spam you. It works out for both parties, because you as the customer get a material benefit of some sort, and they as a business get another e-mail address they can add to the lists they show advertisers. Fair enough, and you can always set up your anti-spam filters to dump the messages being sent by this 'white hat' spammer, if you want.
But check out this story of voluntary spam: I signed up several months ago for a service which gave me free delivery on some products (value $10), knowing I would get weekly e-mail from the business. As it happens, the messages themselves, although technically spam, contained links to other deals this site was providing, so I didn't want to put their messages on my bad spam list, just in case I would miss out on something good.
But with one thing and another, I never got around to reading those weekly messages, and they began to pile up in my e-mail box. And then after a few months, I got a message from the company with this title: 'David - Are you missing out on a good thing?'
No, sir or ma'am, I am not - or didn't plan to. So, I opened the message, to read the following: 'Dear David: We've noticed that you haven't been opening our weekly emails. We don't want to impose, so we've decided to stop sending them to you.'
Huh? This was unbelievable! Not that they were considerate enough to stop spamming me (although that is pretty unbelievable in itself!); it was the first sentence that threw me. How, pray tell, would they know whether or not I opened their message? How could they?
Through the judicious use of ' Web bugs,' that's how. Web bugs have been around for a long time, but there are still lots of people who haven't heard of them. Web bugs, also known as web beacons, pixel tracking and post click tracking, are little - very little - devices that appear on Web pages that collect data on a variety of things, such as how many users from which countries or ISPs visited a site - or, information of a more, shall we say, personal nature.
For example: Have you ever noticed how when you are surfing at a site located, say, in California, the banner ads on that site still appear in Hebrew and advertise Israeli goods and services? How do they know the only people visiting the site are Israeli? What about visitors from Japan? Do they look at the Hebrew ads on the site and say 'How do those people read that stuff?'
But I digress. The answer to all these questions is, you guessed it, Web bug. Such bugs, which usually consist of very small images (1 pixel squared!), appear on many Web sites and collect information about you, the user, and send it back to Central. When they determine where your computer is located (easy to do with IP detection software), they, or their ad affiliate, flash banners they think will interest you. Ditto for the types of products you get shown. Once upon a time there was an uproar over the use of what many call invasive advertising tactics (see http://www.bugnosis.org/faq.html), but like with so many other information era battles, the little guy has more or less lost this one, too - and Web bugs are a feature on almost all major commercial sites today (see the 'Web bug report' on http://tinyurl.com/o5zxb). Needless to say, of course, these bugs can be used for more nefarious purposed (http://www.bugnosis.org/faq.html).
And Web bugs work in e-mail, too - HTML e-mail, the kind with the pictures, which can and usually do contain these beacons, informing their master of all sorts of interesting thing about the recipient's computer, such as whether they have been keeping their end of the deal by reading the spam. In other words, once you open a spam message to see who sent it to you, you've lost - because they already know that you've looked at their message! It's even worse, of course, if you click on those little 'unsubscribe' links at the bottom of the message, because now they know their spam has reached an e-mailbox that actually gets read!
Disabling HTML in e-mail programs helps (see http://www.birdhouse.org/etc/evilmail.htm, which covers many programs and Web mail sites). And if you want to avoid sites that use Web bugs altogether, check out Bugnosis, a free download from http://www.bugnosis.org for Windows users. Bugnosis provides a special panel in Internet Explorer, which, when it detects a Web bug, beeps and zeroes in on the offending image. Then you can decide for yourself if you feel like sharing your personal stats with someone 'out there.' Bugnosis puts some bug killing power back in the hands of the people; fighting Web bugs may be a losing battle, but at least you'll know who you're losing to.
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