Finding out if someone clicked on a link

I’m not a huge fan of all those tracking scripts and applications that have popped up lately. It does not really matter if they track if an email was read or a link visited, they all invade other peoples privacy. I’m not saying that I can’t see their uses, can’t count the times that I asked myself if a recipient received and read the email that I have send to him.

In my opinion though the loss of privacy does not justify the gain, because in the end it does not really matter that much if you know if someone read the email or visited the link you send him. Tracking users, no matter if its done in large scale by companies or in smaller scale by individuals, is not right. Not for this purpose anyone.

Enough of the ramblings. I’m the last to tell you what you can and cannot do on the Internet. I just wanted to make my position clear before posting the links to the following two websites.

Linkblip and UrlVi are two online scripts that convert links into urls that are tracked much like tinyurl but with tracking included. If someone clicks the links you will be notified by email if you have been using Linkblip or by accessing a page of statistics if you have been using UrlVi.

Both bring fourth another concern that i have. They disguise the original link which is a technique used by spammers as well. Instead of showing the link url www.ghacks.net they display http://lburl.com/dcgdy or http://urlvi.be/rus2k which do not reveal any information about the destination.

I would be very cautious about such a link even if a friend would be sending it to me. My first reaction would be to call, chat or reply to that friend asking what the link was all about.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Sunday February 24, 2008 -
Tags:Email, links, privacy, tracking, user tracking