Wanted to share a quick update. We continue to investigate solutions for multiple recipient tracking -- including a better way to mitigate self-open notifications. Any solution we implement, however, is unlikely to use IP address -- so exploring the right way to handle it will take us some time.
In the meantime, we are moving forward with the removal of location data from the activity feed tomorrow to respect recipient privacy. We will continue to update this thread as we make progress.
I’m the Director of Product responsible for the sales products. We very much appreciate all this feedback. Removing location was a hard decision, and ultimately we feel it is the right one. There is an ongoing discussion in the industry about the ethics of location data of email recipients. I don’t want HubSpot to be on the wrong side of that discussion, and I want to be proud of what we build. We do understand that for some users, removing the location information from the activity feed is negatively impacting your experience, and so my team and I are looking at ways to improve both self open notifications and multiple recipient tracking. Stay tuned.
@stiebens61, you're right. While we are still able to minimize the risk of false open and click notifications for any activities that you perform, there are times where this technology simply won't work based on a few different factors. I've ammended my previous comment.
We understand that some of our customers use location data to differentiate between recipients in one-to-many email sends. While it’s never an easy decision to remove functionality from our product, we believe this is the right thing to do to protect the privacy of the end customer.
We made the decision to remove the location feature after analyzing its current use and weighing that against its potential for abuse and privacy concerns for the recipients. We are currently exploring other ways to provide this functionality that don’t include revealing location data and will keep our community updated on progress.
I'm Elise -- one of the product marketing managers here at HubSpot -- with a quick update on this.
To start, thank you all for sharing your feedback and voicing your concerns. We always try to strike a balance between giving our customers the tools they want and being mindful of the impact those tools have on their audience. While email tracking is a valuable tool, we believe that tracking location data doesn’t improve the email recipient’s experience, and it feels out of step with evolving consumer expectations around privacy.
@mschnitt For the Love of God, can you please reactivate this feature until your crack team of product folks come up with another solution. This is completly unusable. Customer email that originally only went to 1 person, but their response needed action so it has been forwared to others and employees around the world have opened this email. I can no longer tell if the customer is viewing this. Please help us!!!!
Would have been nice to know you are doing this.... we work with global organizations with employees travelling frequently. The removal of this feature will make it harder for our sales reps to schedule appropriate meeting times and know when someone is away from the office.
Also does this affect list segmentation by region? Again, we work with companies who have workers in distinct business groups based on their locations, will i still be able to segment lists data by location??
Without the ability to track unique opens, on a one to many email, the value of your solution is significantly degraded.
I'm unclear how you are surveying your users for value and fit, but simply removing the capability all together while ignoring the underlying customer need is a big miss.
You guys are really shooting yourselves in the foot here. Activity feed is the main feature I utilize from Hubspot.
There is already a flaw in that it would track my own opens (I can't block my IP from all the locations I work)
Much of the time there is no contact connected to opens. If you CC others on the email - for example, my own employees - one cannot tell if the principal recipient has opened the email or if it was a CC.
Now you remove the location where the email is opened reducing intel even further.
In effect, you're reducing the value of the activity tracking to zero. Time to look for another solution.
Very frustrating. I receive an email in the morning and all the persons in my reply are in differents countries. It's imposible to know if the person more important for me opened my email.
What I have executed in the meantime is create a custom view on the deals segment that is filtered by means of 'next month' and by my 'transport date' custom suya. At least this manner we are able to see the deals which are due for transport in the month in advance at a glance.