didtheyreadit.com

TIP OF THE DAY

didtheyreadit.com

June 3, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/technology/circuits/03spyy.html?ex=1401681600&en=1f25d1286e981ca4&ei=5007&partner=USERLAND

Who Got the Message? There's a Way to Know

By MARK GLASSMAN

NEW service promises to pull back the curtain on anyone hiding behind the common white lie "I never got your e-mail." Users of the service, DidTheyReadIt (didtheyreadit.com), can clandestinely track when and where their e-mail is read.

The service, which has already drawn complaints from privacy advocates, offers a new and quiet way to harvest behavioral information about friends, colleagues and potential consumers.

"There's a type of covert surveillance here," said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit privacy advocacy group. "Just from a technology viewpoint, it's basically an evil service."

E-mail programs like Eudora and Outlook have long offered an optional return-receipt feature, which prompts the recipient of a message to inform the sender that they have opened the message, and another service, Msgtag (www.msgtag.com), notifies users by e-mail when their outgoing messages have been opened. But DidTheyReadIt is the first such service to keep itself a secret from the recipient, as well as the first to report on where the message was read.

"It's a potential invasion of privacy, but it's also a potential tool for changing communication," said Alastair Rampell, whose company, Rampell Software, developed the service.

He said the software was a defense against overzealous spam filters that route legitimate messages to junk folders.

"Who knows if it gets through?" Mr. Rampell said.

Subscribers to the DidTheyReadIt service receive an e-mail message notifying them of the time, rough location and duration of the the recipient's viewing of each message the subscriber sent. The service is available in quarterly, semiannual or annual subscriptions and ranges in price from $25 for three months to $50 a year. A free account allows users to send five tracked messages a month.

"I won't deny that it has a potentially stealth purpose," Mr. Rampell said, adding that he has received more than 1,000 negative e-mail messages about the service, which became available on May 24. He said his detractors usually offer one of two criticisms. "One of them is that they think that this is evil and that I should go to jail," he said. The other is that, for all of its controversy, the product does not always work.

DidTheyReadIt depends on what are known as Web bugs, graphic files so tiny that they cannot be seen that can be embedded in an e-mail message or downloaded from a Web site. In the case of DidThey- ReadIt, a Web bug is embedded in each e-mail message sent through the service. When the recipient opens that message, the Web bug is downloaded and the DidTheyReadIt server records the circumstances of that exchange. But some e-mail programs do not automatically download Web bugs, and many can be configured so that they do not.

Mr. Rampell likened his service to caller ID, which can be disabled by users. "But that doesn't mean I'm going to throw away my caller ID," he said.

Some privacy advocates say the caller ID analogy is imperfect because Mr. Rampell's product is more invasive. "When you call a friend, you just by nature know how long the conversation was, but you don't know where they are, what room they're in," said Ari Schwartz, an associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, another privacy advocacy group.

Regardless of consumer sentiment, DidTheyReadIt does follow the privacy guidelines enacted by federal law.

"It's definitely pushing the line of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, though it probably does not violate it," Mr. Schwartz said.

The privacy act and state wiretapping statutes impose restrictions on the recording, storage and sharing of the content but not on the circumstances of communications.

"It's also something that would be very difficult to legislate out of existence," Mr. Schwartz said.

Mr. Rampell said he did not believe that online privacy should be held to a higher standard than privacy in any other medium. "Why do you have the right to hide from somebody that you got their message?" he said. "Whom is it hurting to say: 'Your message got through. Have a nice day.'?"

Mr. Rotenberg said he was concerned that service would become merely another tool for spammers seeking to learn more about consumer e-mail habits. "I don't think, at the personal level, there's much value to people who know one another," he said.

But Mr. Rampell emphasized that how subscribers use the service is up to them. "If you're upset that your friend sent you an e-mail using DidTheyReadIt, then that's a problem between you and your friend," he said.