I suggested at the time that it might be equally revealing to look at online wine retailers; and that is what I do in this blog post.
As in the previous post, i have used the Blacklight Privacy Inspector to assess each of the nominated websites. This recently released tool is intended to let you find out who is tracking you when you visit their website (see: It’s easier than ever to find out how your favorite websites are tracking you). Blacklight checks for the presence of each of seven possible types of Ad Tracking technology on each site, which are described in detail in an online article (How we built a real-time privacy inspector).
I ran Blacklight across the website of each of the selected online wine sellers last week. These stores are a somewhat arbitrary collection of six dozen possibilities based in the USA (27), the UK (23) , or the European Union (22). Most of the non-US stores are ones I have used myself, at some time over the past decade or two. Sadly, I cannot check any wine retailing that is part of general food stores (such as Amazon, Aldi, Lidl, Costco or Trader Joe’s), because Blacklight checks the main home page of the website, rather than just the subpage specific to wine.
The table at the bottom of this post presents the results of my tests. The columns of the table present each of the seven Blacklight criteria, for each of the named websites (one per row). The first two criteria list the number of trackers encountered, while the other five columns indicate (Y=yes) that the site was detected carrying out the named tracking activity. A summary of Ad Tracking: the 3 main types & how to do it effectively will put you in the picture.
Only 8 / 72 (11%) of the websites were not detected doing any ad tracking at all; and congratulations to those one-ninth of the website owners. Sadly, none of these sites were based in the USA, with five being in the UK and three in the EU.
Indeed, in general, the US sites are doing much more tracking than the other locations. This may have more than a little to do with the much more stringent internet-privacy regulations that have been implemented in the European Union (of which the UK is still a part for the next couple of weeks). The EU collective General Data Protection Regulation differs notably from the state-based approach in the USA (eg. the California Consumer Privacy Act). Actually, the EU is intending to make things even harder in the near future (EU targets big tech in new proposals).
This is not to say, of course, that all US sites are equally bad, because they are obviously not. Indeed, 15 of the 27 sites (55%) were not doing a great deal of tracking; and two sites actually had only one Ad Tracker, while one site had only one Third Party Cookie. However, the other half of the US sites were doing egregious amounts of tracking. The Blacklight check on 80,000 of the most popular websites indicates that the average number of Ad Trackers per site is 7, while the average number of Third Party Cookies is 3. So, those online stores with more than a dozen Trackers (maximum = 27) or Cookies (maximum = 59) are sailing pretty close to the wind.
Most of the UK and EU websites are behaving relatively responsibly, although there are clearly three UK sites that exceed the tracking behavior of the others by a wide margin. Interestingly, one of these is Naked Wines, which has both a US and a UK website — the UK site does notably less tracking that the US site, but still much more than most of the other UK sites.
As far as informing Facebook and Google about your site visits goes, almost all of the US sites did both, while less than a half of the UK and US sites inform Facebook, and less than half of the EU sites inform Google. So, I can expect to receive far fewer personalized ads following me around the web, directly as a result of living in Europe.
In contrast, the EU and UK websites are more likely to be be doing Session Recording than are the US sites; and Keystroke Capturing was detected in the EU but not in the UK. Neither of these practices should be necessary for the purpose of ordering wine online.
To me, the oddest experience occurred at the Drizly store. This was the only site with a CAPTCHA, to assess whether I am a bot or not; but it then proceeded to track me mercilessly, when it realized I am a human (highest number of Cookies, third-highest number of Trackers). I feel doubly insulted!
In my previous post, I specifically noted that many people who have set up their own website may not fully understand what sort of tracking they have allowed on their site (and, indeed, one site author expressed complete surprise, and immediately started doing something about it). However, professionally run wine stores have no such excuse. The offenders listed in the table below need to get their act together.
Note that assessing the US stores is complicated. After all, the infamous Three-tier alcohol-distribution system disrupts the idea of a national online liquor retailer (unlike in the EU, where there is free trade across all member countries). The list of Beer, Wine & Liquor Stores in the US suggests that there were 45,952 liquor businesses back in July, and none of them have a market share of greater than 5%. So, it would be hard to check them all.
As I noted last time, there are some people who apparently don't mind having advertisers looking over their shoulders as they browse the web. However, it goes beyond that. Ad Tracking is like having both mummy and daddy following you everywhere you go, and trying to train you to "do it right". If you do not want this to still be happening to you, then not telling them what you are up to is the obvious first step.
This has been a good year for online alcohol sales, because there is a pandemic, and people are not too keen on going into crowded shops. We are not sure how long this will last (see: Covid online wine boom fizzles out), but I assume that many of you are ordering your Christmas drinks online this year. Now it's time to find out what price you might really be paying — when the product is free, that means you are the product (Don't expose yourself: A guide to online privacy).
With David's indulgence, I am uploading the entire text of this Wall Street Journal article in two parts (as it exceeds the maximum 4,096 characters).
ReplyDelete[Part One of Three]
From The Wall Street Journal "Technology" Section(January 19-20, 2019, Page B4):
"The Latest Hot Tech Secret: Your Email;Frustrated by social media, businesses and others looking for an audience [now] turn to an old standby."
URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hot-new-channel-for-reaching-real-people-email-11547874005?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
By Christopher Mims"Key Words" Column
Kids think it’s fussy and archaic, but for brands, creators and businesses of every kind the emerging medium of choice to reach audiences is the only guaranteed-delivery option the internet has left: email.
Consumer email services have been around for almost three decades, but to hear email’s most ardent fans talk about it now, it’s an undiscovered country too long neglected by those who could benefit from it the most. In the #deletefacebook era, it’s become a way to fight back against the algorithms that try to dictate what people see. Unlike on Facebook , readers receive everything they signed up to receive, in neat chronological order, alongside missives from friends, family and their various communities.
For marketers great and small, the algorithms that power social media represent the ever-rising cost of doing business on the platforms owned by the duopoly of Google and Facebook. Email allows authors to intimately connect with readers, lets brands address their most loyal customers and budding startups develop armies of influencers.
Readers’ ready access to the “unsubscribe” button is largely a good thing for all involved, since it nudges email content creators to produce authentic, high-quality experiences rather than superficially engaging ones, and to connect in ways that are deeper than what advertising-first mediums like Facebook generally allow.
[Part Two of Three]
ReplyDeleteFrom The Wall Street Journal "Technology" Section(January 19-20, 2019, Page B4):
"The Latest Hot Tech Secret: Your Email;Frustrated by social media, businesses and others looking for an audience [now] turn to an old standby."
URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hot-new-channel-for-reaching-real-people-email-11547874005?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
By Christopher Mims"Key Words" Column
He’s Got Mail
Seven years ago, Wales-based jeans company Hiut Denim was on the brink of collapse. Co-founder David Hieatt -- who sold another clothing firm to the Timberland Co. in 2006 -- got the idea to start a thoughtful email newsletter full of content people would like whether they were buying his jeans or not.
Today, these emails include tastefully curated roundups of the articles, videos, products and quotations that Hiut employees found fascinating that week, plus yearly features such as “100+ Makers and Mavericks” and this monster gift guide which features exactly none of the company’s own products.
“If you ask me, would I want a mailing list with 1,000 people on it or 100,000 followers on Twitter, I’d take the 1,000 emails all day long, because the business you get from 1,000 emails will be much more than you get from 100,000 people on Twitter or Instagram,” says Mr. Hieatt.
Hiut has become a thriving boutique fashion brand (Exhibit A: Meghan Markle), and Mr. Hieatt has written a book about the power of email newsletters for business.
Email still has the highest return on investment per marketing dollar spent, according to the Data & Marketing Association. And while Facebook, especially, has whipsawed marketers with ever-changing rules about how to reach customers -- and how much Facebook will charge for the privilege -- with email, a company owns its own lists.
What’s happening isn’t really an email resurgence -- it just never stopped growing in scale and importance, says Sara Radicati, chief executive of the Radicati Group, a tech-industry analyst firm.
Unlike tweets or Facebook posts, no one company controls or even sees all the world’s email, but estimates from Ms. Radicati’s firm show steady 4% growth a year in the number of emails sent, with a record 281 billion emails a day sent in 2018.
Many companies help firms handle marketing and related email communications -- Adobe , IBM and Oracle are some of the biggest -- but even medium-size tech companies specializing in email handle mind-boggling volumes. SendGrid delivers 45 billion emails a month for more than 74,000 customers, including Airbnb, Spotify, Uber and Hertz. The company processed 2.8 billion emails on Black Friday 2018 alone, an increase of more than 1 billion emails from the previous year, a company spokeswoman says.
[Part Three of Three]
ReplyDeleteFrom The Wall Street Journal "Technology" Section(January 19-20, 2019, Page B4):
"The Latest Hot Tech Secret: Your Email;Frustrated by social media, businesses and others looking for an audience [now] turn to an old standby."
URL: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hot-new-channel-for-reaching-real-people-email-11547874005?ns=prod/accounts-wsj
By Christopher Mims"Key Words" Column
Read Me
Email’s success is due to a handful of factors. The first is that, like the web, it’s one of the few open standards we have left. No one controls it, and no company can get between a sender and its recipient.
Another factor is a dawning awareness that social media may not be particularly good for our mental health or our democracy, leading to a wave of users scaling back and even opting out entirely. The things that drive people to subscribe to and actually open emails are very different from the things that motivate them on social media. Email, by contrast, can feel healthy, says Robin Sloan, a writer who started an email newsletter -- like a blog delivered to the inbox -- almost 10 years ago.
Other creators, particularly journalists, are also turning to email as a creative outlet. “What other technology do we use everyday that doesn’t require a terms-of-service?” says Craig Mod, a writer and essayist who recently argued that one future of the book could be serialization as an email newsletter.
TheSkimm, a daily news digest started by two former news producers, has 7 million subscribers and recently raised $12 million from Google Ventures and other backers.
On Substack, a subscription-based email newsletter startup launched in October 2017, journalist Judd Legum publishes a daily politics email. While he says over 37,000 subscribers receive the free version, a small percentage pays $5 a month for a premium version. After Substack takes its cut, Mr. Legum still makes what he calls a comfortable full-time income.
The underlying technology of email hasn’t changed in decades, which is both a blessing and a curse. The average email client is like a “preweb 1.0 browser,” says Substack CEO Christopher Best. This means, for example, that it’s impossible to embed a video that would play on all of the major email apps. Not only are emails blissfully free of annoying autoplaying videos, they’re also relatively light on privacy-vandalizing trackers common to webpages and apps.
A continued and growing love of email isn’t about to upend the cash machine that is search and social media. “The whole world is just spread thin across devices and apps, so you also have to be on social, video, on paid search -- everything all at once,” says Ben Chestnut, co-founder and CEO of MailChimp.
But marketers and anyone else trying to reach people would be remiss in ignoring it. When faced with a decision of going with a newsletter or a chatbot, for instance, consider this: Chat apps are a guaranteed way to get people’s attention on mobile, but they demand an immediate response. Meanwhile, we’re more likely to consume email on mobile devices than anywhere else, but at our leisure. This makes it the perfect slow-read companion for a device that is otherwise demanding constant attention.“ [Our smartphones] might as well be a brain implant, so the question is, what’s the right way to wield that to talk to other people?” says Mr. Best. “If the answer is, anyone you’ve ever known and people you don’t know should be able to interrupt you at any time, that is obviously dystopian.”
Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com