In the end, McDonald’s doesn’t want you to have their app. Rather, they want McDonald’s to have consumers’ money, and they think an app is a worthwhile way to facilitate that.
I eat at McDonald’s about as often as you do, and I have also declined to install their app for basically the same reasons you cite for yourself. Their app isn’t for you and it isn’t for me. It’s for people who (a) eat at McDonald’s regularly and (b) like ordering via their app for whatever reason.
I mean, so what? Other people can use the McDonald’s app if they want to. You and I can order directly on the rare occasion we’re eating at McDonald’s. To each their own, no?
Do you have a cite for this? I didn’t think Google and its partners did mass email advertising at all. It does offer location-based advertising, but that’s usually for search results and Google Maps.
They do offer Gmail Ads, but those are clearly labeled as ads and not regular emails, and it doesn’t say anything about location-based targeting. It also wouldn’t just result in a blank virus-filled email, hopefully… someone has to actually pay for that.
The more common scenario for location is targeting is that when someone searches for “bike shop” and yours is within X miles, and you’ll show up as one of the sponsored listings. Not to automatically send an email when you get close. Not saying it’s impossible technologically, just not something I thought Google was doing.
While not a technophobe or vehemently anti-app myself, I only download & use useful-to-me ones. I was just pointing out that one can do more with one app (browser) than umpteen company specific ones so someone vehemently anti-app isn’t necessarily crippled even if they do have a smart phone.
Those are valid points. I confess that I don’t understand why anyone who identifies as “anti-app” would make an exception for one app—a web browser—or why they’d buy a smartphone in the first place.
I mean, if apps are bad full stop, then the browser, telephone, email and text apps are bad too, right?
And I suspect this was part of Chronos’ point: if you’re using a smartphone in any capacity, you’re using apps. A flip phone should be the only mobile phone an anti-app person would want to use.
Then again, I don’t quite understand what it means to be “anti-app” or why one might feel that way, so maybe I’m missing something.
Yeah, this is the part of my explanation that I wasn’t sure about- we all know they use location data to serve up ads, but how/if location data results in a specifically sent email, as opposed to, as you mention, a labeled Gmail ad or a search result ad, etc.
While it’s possible from a technological standpoint, I’m just not aware that this is something they currently do. If I’m wrong and they do this, I’d be happy to be corrected. It would just be quite a leap from their other ads.
Mainly, I don’t think Google is stupid enough to try this, because it would bother a lot of people. And I really don’t think a virus-laden blank email ad would have gotten through their basic ad vetting process anyway.
And from the bike shop’s perspective, “let’s send everyone an email when they ride by” is nonsensical. Why not just put up a billboard? By the time they read the email, they’re already gone.
In online marketing there is something called “remarketing”, which is the targeting of customers based on some previously expressed/implied interest, such as having visited one of your websites, engaged with you on Facebook, opened some of your emails, etc. You can remarket geographically too, but to do it in real-time means you’d need a way to track your customers in real time, and that means Google or some app leaking your location info.
This is one of those situations where using an app CAN be worse than using the browser, because Android lets them run in the background to some degree (depending on Android version and permissions), and if they have access to location data, they can be constantly sending it back to some server. Google Maps, for example, uses this functionality to create a timeline of everywhere you’ve been. The Chrome app doesn’t do that, and probably can’t unless you leave a browser window open and the screen on the whole time.
But still, it would be silly for an app or service to email you based on your current location, and sillier still to just make it be a one-liner virus. If this geo-targeting works as well as the OP is assuming it does, we’d be seeing a lot more of it, and probably more from restaurants and bars and such and not bike shops.
OP, do you want to share the headers from those emails you got? The source? It could help identify where the email came from, at least.
I stand corrected on the prexisting email address held by the business.
Google has recently launched “Customer Match” which appears to allows businesses to upload their email database which Google matches to their database and allows the business to use that in their ad campaign. One of the explicit options in a Google campaign is to target ads to geographic locations. Voila!
Customer Match is a remarketing tool. It lets you show normal Google Ads (maps, search results, youtube, Gmail ads, etc.) to previous customers of yours who you have the addresses for. But that’s still not the same as sending them unsolicited spam emails. Gmail got so big in part because it had excellent spam filters, and still does (the OP says it was sent to spam, after all). If Google wanted to email advertise to someone, they’d just do it as a regular Gmail ad at the top, indicated as such, not send a weird virusy email to them that its own email service then sends straight to spam
I don’t know about the cycle business, but it’d be great if malware had to follow GDPR as well!
“We’re about to encrypt all your files for ransom. Do you agree to this or you rather us leave you alone and never bother you again?”
