I'm used to !privacy. I'm used to evading tracking online. If there are data I want to provide to someone, I'm used to explicitly choosing to provide it, or choosing not to prevent certain data from being collected.

I clicked on a link in an e-mail today on my mobile device (only very select, unimportant messages are sent to that device) having forgotten to first look at the link to see if it included a tracking identifier. It did. I felt betrayed and upset. I still do half a day later. And all they learned was that I read the e-mail and clicked on that particular link.

This is such a basic tracking mechanism that is so mundane compared to what users unknowingly go through every day. If average users knew what I did, would they even care? I get upset over deanonymization for a e-mail and link. Would they get upset over their entire lives being tracked, analyzed, and sold?

Maybe. And shame on you, Intercept---you should know better. Presumably it's their e-mail service (MailChimp). I'll be letting them know. That makes it worse, actually, since now MailChimp has gathered a statistic on me, and every other Intercept newsletter subscriber. My e-mail address was more than enough for them to know about (I think it's obvious from my linking of articles that I read The Intercept).

If you care about your users, don't use any tracking features provided by your email campaign service, and make sure they don't include any behind your back. If they do, don't use them.