I ran across a retail spying operation today. There is a startup that allows you to upload documents for other to view and then:
Every time someone clicks on this link, it opens the document in DocSend’s HTML viewer in your browser — and of course, it also collects data. You know if the recipient went through all the slides or pages, and you even know how much time he or she spent on every slide. You know if he or she forwarded the document to someone else as DocSend collects email addresses of people who opened the document.
This sounds like the metadata that lawyers are careful to scrub from documents before forwarding them to other parties. Yes?
BTW, when asked about the obvious privacy issue:
Shana Fisher: It’s a little like spying. What do you think of that?
Answer: There is no privacy issue. It’s a tool, like any tool you misuse it in some scenario. It’s a tool for business people, for business relationships.
Sorry, that went by a little fast. “There is no privacy issue….It’s a tool for business people, for business relationships.”
Really? I may be wrong but I thought most spying is concerned with business people and business relationships? Governments worry about who said some government minister was butt ugly but no serious people are worried about that sort of thing.
The question is: Do you want send information to a classic intelligence gathering application for future unknown uses by others?
The answer is: NO!
The quotes in this post are from: DocSend Is The Analytics Tool For Documents We’ve All Been Waiting For by Romain Dillet.
PS: Don’t bother sending me a file link for this or similar services. It will languish unread.