
Capital One forcing me to “prove” I opened their emails - CapOneCustomer
I have a Capital One credit card.  I have my account configured so that I receive email notices for various activities (bill due, card charged, unusual transactions, etc.).  Recently, I received an email (legit) from Capital One that reads in part:<p>------------------------------------<p>Open emails regularly to continue receiving notifications.<p>Recently, we updated the Paperless Terms &amp; Conditions for your account. We&#x27;ve modified the Terms to make it clear that you&#x27;ll need to open a Capital One email once every 12 months to continue receiving email notifications like statement ready alerts.<p>------------------------------------<p>From a tech perspective, I&#x27;m perfectly aware of what Capital One means by &quot;open&quot; - &quot;load a tracking beacon&quot;.  Since I don&#x27;t (and won&#x27;t) I assume I won&#x27;t be receiving any email notices 13 months from now.<p>Personally, I find this requirement from Capital One to be appalling.  I&#x27;m curious if anyone else has received a notice like this (do other banks do this?) and what your opinion is.
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finnthehuman
This is why you don't give the business unreliable metrics.

Whoever came up with this requirement at capital one had the sense that email
surveillance was capable of delivering meaningful read metrics. Who let that
happen?

You may understand the implementation makes the metric comically unreliable,
especially for email with so many clients that block images by default. But
when is the last time you quantified the margin of error in all the metrics
reporting? Never? Great rigor you've got going there, data science. Even if
you do clarify how poor the signal is, how long until someone copy-pastes it
into Excel, removes that context and shows the graph to someone with more
decision making power? And that's the best case scenario. People are, in
general, way more statistically illiterate than you suspect. Remember how many
people saw Hillary had 85% on fivethirtyeight, and were convinced that it
meant she would win?

I've had arguments with Amazon employees that: no, they do not know how many
people open their emails. Trying to explain what they have is a lower bound
that is closer to "how many emails are read in gmail on an iphone" than "how
many emails are read"? Nope. The UI says "unread," therefore it is impossible
that the user read the email.

Stop implementing bullshit metrics in your software.

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sethammons
There is a trend in inboxing-rates: if there is no interaction with a sender,
start moving the messages to spam and start penalizing the sending IP address.
This means senders, in order to protect their IP reputation, do well to remove
recipients who don't engage with email sends. The two most typical ways to do
that are a tracking pixel or tracking if a link is clicked.

It seems like a natural progression. What is unfortunate is that the inboxes
are really part of the problem because measuring engagement and lowering spam
is a good thing, but just because I did not open the mail (load tracking
pixel) or click a link, does not mean I did not engage. Reading a subject line
is good enough for a lot of email I get. Many users have images blocked, and
tracking pixels are rendered useless. I still have email that Gmail puts in
spam that I really want, but I only use the subject. It is a non-trivial
problem because there is an arms race between inboxes wanting to prevent spam
and spammers wanting in, and in the middle is businesses who have legitimate
email to send or normal people sending email.

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eesmith
Call them up every month and tell them that you've read their email.

After 13 months, if/when the emails stop, call them up again and ask why
they've stopped.

For even more fun, figure out which domain(s) they use for tracking and have
your router/firewall block them.

Then when you complain about not receiving the emails, you can still say that
you've been doing "load images" to no effect.

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wmf
I can imagine plenty of practical reasons for such a policy, like customers
who have paperless statements going to an email address that they no longer
check or have access to.

If you don't like this just switch to paper statements. Wanting to receive
financial statements without leaving any evidence that you received them
doesn't fall under any definition of privacy that I know of.

~~~
Data_Junkie
Dude, privacy is the definition of not leaving evidence.

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dyeje
It seems reasonable to me to not want to waste resources sending emails that
will not be seen. Opening an email once a year does not seem very onerous.

Also, they probably have a way to turn emails back on via the website / app so
just mark it on your calendar.

~~~
eesmith
The question isn't one of "that will not be seen" it's one of "they don't know
if it's seen because the reader didn't use the mechanisms which allow email
tracking."

~~~
dyeje
I believe tracking pixels are the only way to track email opens. I think their
goal makes sense and it's unfortunate that it doesn't work for privacy focused
customers.

~~~
eesmith
Another is X-Image-URL, though most mail readers don't support it.

It also doesn't work for the generation of people who started with text email
so acquired a belief that if it can't be expressed in text (or maybe with an
attachment) then it isn't worthwhile.

At least, that's my belief.

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duxup
I wonder if the issue might be some question about if the user is receiving
statements or not.

IIRC even statements sent to customers are covered by some banking regulations
and if they're not done right there can be serious fines.

Ages ago I worked on equipment that ran printers that printed financial
statements. Any hint that anything might be late got the executive team
nervous and their full attention. It was serious stuff.

Granted that was years ago and they could just want to track you but if the
requirement is just every 12 months... that really doesn't seem like effective
tracking.

Perhaps another issue is a security check, such as a dormant or hijacked email
that would otherwise expose itself by reading all their emails from another
country unexpectedly?

~~~
CapOneCustomer
> I wonder if the issue might be some question about if the user is receiving
> statements or not.

Couldn't they just ask me? Then I could reply (or not).

> Perhaps another issue is a security check, such as a dormant or hijacked
> email that would otherwise expose itself by reading all their emails from
> another country unexpectedly?

A tracking beacon is no guarantee that _I_ opened the email, just that
_somebody_ (with access to my account) opened the email, no?

~~~
duxup
Certainly none of it is a sure thing but doing due diligence might still be
worthwhile of there are any regulatory or security questions.

It just doesn't strike me that every 12 months would provide much tracking
value.

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MH15
It's a __federally endorsed banking account __, you can 't enjoy such services
without assuming tracking liabilities.

If this is a burden to you, why not just open the emails in a text-only
client?

~~~
eesmith
The OP wrote "I don't (and won't)" use an email reader with such tracking
liabilities.

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smileysteve
I also received this email and was concerned about it. It seems to be a new
trend.

