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Comment by sadfklsjlkjwt | Hacker News Reader

This is creepy.

Do the customers know that they are being spied on?

I think these guys are being a bit precious and don't realise how much is tracked these days. All the email marketing campaign platforms do it, all the specialist quoting tools and line stores do it.

Good work mate, keep going.

In this case the tracking is the only USP. If someone sent me a link to one of these I’d decline.

There is a myriad of document tracking, analytics and crm software out there in enterprise that captures a scary amount of data, Sizle does't do that.

Like any email campaign manager, Sizle tells you when your document is opened, and tells you how much time the user spent looking at it.

Instead of whatabouting it, maybe you can answer sadfklsjlkjwt’s question: do they know this is happening?

Recipients of Mailchimp campaigns have the same experience as recipients of Sizle presentations. They’re not told the sender will be notified when the document is opened however this type of tracking is fairly commonplace.

For comparison, you might allow cookies from a website you visit regularly, even though they’ve notified you do you really know the extent to which you’re being tracked by a cookie like GA? A large part of the online community assume at least some part of their activity is being stored somewhere, Sizle doesn’t even come close to the tracking that’s being applied to almost everyone that visits any news media site for example.

We made our own analytics tool from scratch that only gathers a few metrics to support sales teams. If that’s creepy to you I would recommend looking into some of the bigger data giants.

Email recipients are generally notified by their mail client, despite the intention of the sender to keep it hidden. Email clients do not load remote images by default for this reason, requiring additional user action. Email clients warn users when the text of a link is one URL, but the target is another, for this reason.

Being so uncomfortable to just explain one of the core value propositions of your product in plain language is not a good look. If you’re not confident in what your product does or able to explain why it’s a good thing, you might want to redesign it.

So, no.

I don’t think this is necessarily untrue - but I do think you need to think carefully about what your talk track is on this.

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