Barack’s people are tracking clicks

Emails sent by Barack Obama’s people often have URLs in them.

That’s fine but Mr. Obama’s people use a phishing technique where the link displayed is not the real link. My mail reader converts the emails to plain text by default, so it is obvious.

The text “http://my.barackobama.com/Haiti” is actually linked to some obscure URL at my.barackobama.com. This URL probably encodes information about the page to display as well as my identity. It is almost certainly there so that the people running my.barackobama.com can track my behavior if I were to click this link.

This is nothing new. Mr. Obama’s people have been doing things this way since the campaign and it is a common technique for tracking the behavior of people in email marketing campaigns. It has always bugged me, though, that Barack Obama does this.