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Thursday, June 20, 2002

My Big Brother, Apple

As a regular and fairly active Apple customer, I get bunches of email from their various lists.

The other day, I got one announcing the opening of an Apple store out in the Short Hills mall.

I usually keep my email program (Eudora) set not to automatically download images. Without the images, the Apple email was basically unreadable and didn't make any sense -- lots of the text was actually rendered as GIFs.

When I tapped the "Blah" button to View Source on the email, I noticed that all the graphics in the email had ALT tags set to " ".

Yeah, one little blank space.

It made me a little cranky, so I wrote an email to Steve Jobs.

That's a little trick I learned a while back through some friends of mine; write to Steve Jobs and chances are your email will actually Get Read By Somebody Vaguely Important.

Anyway, my email basically said something about accessibility & proper use of ALT tags blahblahblah screenreaders blahblahblah people who read email on portable devices blahblahblah.

I signed it, sent it, and didn't think about it again.

Then this afternoon at work, I got a phone call.

From someone at Apple.

Saying they appreciated my suggestion and they would be improving all their emails to use proper ALT tags as well as offering a plain-text option for all of their subscriber lists, and that they hoped I hadn't been put out. The guy specifically mentioned that email access for handheld users was especially important to them. Which piqued my interest, you can be sure.

Anyway, after I got off the phone, I was chuckling and my boss asked me what was up. When I told her, she asked me where Apple had gotten my phone number.

My eyes grew wide.

I checked my outbox.

No phone number in the email. No phone number on this website. Hell, I don't even think I used my *last name* on the email.

And yet they called me! At work!

Ack. Now I'm creeped out, Sandra Bullock style. Eek.

Posted at 07:04 PM

Comments

001. Mark

Steve knows all.

Actually, did you by chance ever fill out an Apple product registration or iTools account agreement and include the email address you sent the message from along with your work phone? I suspect Apple has linked up their databases as many companies aspire to do but few manage to pull off. When I walked into an Apple store for the first time, I was surprised that the sales person pulled up my name on the register and could see all the Apple products I had registered over the years.

Posted at 07:51PM on Thursday, June 20, 2002

002. Mark

nah it's big brother. they're eyes are watching god, you see...

Posted at 12:49AM on Friday, June 21, 2002

003. chris

they probably just asked microsoft.

Posted at 04:07AM on Friday, June 21, 2002

004. Caitlin

Hmmm

Maybe Apple have worked out how to spy on all Mac users through theirs computers.

Hang on ... I'm in a room with two Macs here. AAAARGH! STEVE JOBS CAN SEE ME!

Posted at 08:58AM on Friday, June 21, 2002

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