Marketing Wins

Off-topic post for today …

In the battle between marketing and security, marketing always wins. This topic came to mind after reading an article on using email aliases to control your email—

For example, if you sign up for a lot of email newsletters, consider doing so with an alias. That way, you can quickly filter the incoming messages sent to that alias—these are probably low-priority, so you can have your provider automatically apply specific labels, mark them as read, or delete them immediately.

One of the most basic things you can do to increase your security against phishing attacks is to have two email addresses, one you give to financial institutions and another one you give to “everyone else.” It would be nice to have a third for newsletters and marketing, but this won’t work in the real world. Why?

Because it’s very rare to find a company that will keep two email addresses on file for you, one for “business” and another for “marketing.” To give specific examples—my mortgage company sends me both marketing messages in the form of a “newsletter” as well as information about mortgage activity. They only keep one email address on file, though, so they both go to a single email address.

A second example—even worse in my opinion—is PayPal. Whenever you buy something using PayPal, the vendor gets the email address associated with the account. That’s fine—they need to send me updates on the progress of the item I ordered, etc. But they also use this email address to send me newsletters … and PayPal sends any information about account activity to the same email address.

Because of the way these things are structured, I cannot separate information about my account from newsletters, phishing attacks, etc. Since modern Phishing campaigns are using AI to create the most realistic emails possible, and most folks can’t spot a Phish anyway, you’d think banks and financial companies would want to give their users the largest selection of tools to fight against scams.

But they don’t. Why?

Because—if your financial information is mingled with a marketing newsletter, you’ll open the email to see what’s inside … you’ll pay attention. Why spend money helping your users not pay attention to your marketing materials by separating them from “the important stuff?”

When it comes to marketing versus security, marketing always wins. Somehow, we in IT need to do better than this.