My group recently had a conference call with our client, Sailthru, which provides transactional and marketing email services. When the VP of Business Development described how the company was able to track users, I was a bit surprised. The company can see when emails are opened and email activity on the account (only for those emails sent by Sailthru's clients). It can also place a tracking cookie when a user clicks on a link embedded in the email. That way Sailthru can track what sites users are interested in, how long users are online, etc. Finally it can track location via a users IP address. This technology isn't necessarily new but it does raise concerns.
Most sites place cookies but people don't really think about cookies when they are checking email or clicking on links in an email. Another issue is how to even block these cookies. Would you have to block the linked site or another website associated with the company in order to stop the cookie? Sailthru (and other email marketing companies) use these tools to give their clients better user data in order to ensure better hit rates and email readership (among other goals) and I am sure the data is being mined in a responsible and secure manner.
The larger issue is that marketing in general (be it surveys via mail, purchase logging or newer methods) relies on a lot of user data. New technologies just change the way user data can now be collected and analyzed.
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