We Saw You

It started with Taco USA.

If you didn’t grow up eating there, I am so sorry, and also I don’t know how to help you at this point. Taco USA had these big-ass beef and bean burritos with sour cream that I would drive across town for. Soft, warm, drive-through, open late. Exactly the kind of food a responsible adult is not supposed to organize her evenings around. I organized my evenings around it anyway.

They closed for good sometime in the late nineties. I know this because the other night for no good reason (except maybe hunger and nostalgia colliding with insomnia) I got a very specific craving and thought, “I’m sure someone has cloned this recipe by now.” So, I went looking.

Their website still exists… technically. It sells hot sauce. It sells t-shirts. It does not sell a single burrito. I scrolled through the whole site with increasing sadness, and at the very bottom, in six-point gray text, sat a designer credit link.

I clicked it. Of course I clicked it. I click every designer credit link. Call it professional curiosity, or just being nosey.

It dropped me on the homepage of some web agency. I scrolled for maybe ninety seconds, thought “Yep, that’s a website,” and closed the tab. The only thing that got my notice was the mouse cursor turning into a cute little 8-bit dinosaur — adorable, criminally underused, and about as functional as tapping your phone with a pool noodle.

I did not fill out a form. I did not click “get a quote.” I did not spend more than a minute on the site. I was still thinking about the burrito.

Twenty minutes later, I had mail.

• Subject line: “Welcome! Let’s Get Started.”
• First line of the email: “Hey Lena. We saw you.”

Now. I’ve gotten a lot of cold outreach email in my time. Most of it has the decency to pretend it doesn’t know me. This one skipped the pretending and went straight to vaguely threatening customer service. “We saw you. You stopped by our site. We noticed. Don’t worry—that’s kind of our thing.”

That’s kind of our thing. As if the thing were charming, and not the exact sentence some guy in a trench coat, standing on a corner, says right before he tries to sell you SEO services.

I kept reading, because at this point I was less irritated than fascinated. The email was signed with a single name. Just the one, like Cher or Madonna or a guy who’s about to ask you for a ride to the airport. Then, three lines down, in the actual signature block: two guys, two entirely different real names. Not a match in sight. I have decided this bothers me more than the surveillance. The single name, it turned out, belonged to the little dinosaur and doubled as one of their nicknames. I found myself circling back to irritated.

The universe believes in the rule of three, this email did not. The email hit me with its real agenda: four buttons.

• “I Need Some Marketing Help.”
• “What Does This Cost?”
• “Just Checking Things Out.”
• And, wedged in there like it was no big deal, “Get Featured on Our Podcast for $29.”

So the full arc of this email was: I noticed you exist and would you like to pay twenty-nine dollars to be on my podcast.

Whoever signed it: pick a lane.

Here’s the part that’s actually useful

Nobody hacked me. Nobody needed a login, a cookie, or my permission. Businesses can subscribe to services that match public business info, IP ranges, device fingerprints, and browsing patterns to make an educated guess about who just landed on their site, then fire off an automated hello.

It’s legal. It’s common. And it’s exactly as unglamorous as it sounds once you see how the trick works — which, frankly, is true of most magic tricks.

In case you are wondering, it costs about $100-$150 a month to send your own creepy emails.

I bring this up because I actually lived this exact situation, years earlier. We’d just moved into a new house, and I’d gotten my first-ever cable internet connection (goodbye dial-up). It was like being granted electricity. What I didn’t know was that Comcast, at the time, grouped customers into little shared network nodes. This is basically a neighborhood party line, except for internet traffic instead of gossip.

One day I found a note waiting for me. Not on my door. On my computer’s desktop. A neighbor had noticed my machine sitting wide open on our shared node, tested whether I’d changed the default password, and confirmed that I had not. So he left me a very polite, very alarming message explaining that anyone on our node who knew that default password could walk right in. He laid out exactly how Comcast’s local network setup worked, and (because apparently this is just what the good ones do) invited me to join the local Macintosh users group he happened to be part of.

It scared the crap out of me. It was also, genuinely, one of the more thoughtful things a stranger has ever done for me. Same basic input as that email: someone out there noticed something about me that I hadn’t noticed myself, and reached out uninvited to say so. Completely different intent. One of those people wanted to protect something. The other wanted twenty-nine dollars and my email address in a nurture sequence.

That’s really the whole lesson, and it’s the one I’d actually want my clients to walk away with. This kind of visitor-identification technology exists, it’s not going anywhere, and there’s nothing wrong with a business using it. Plenty of legitimate reasons to know who’s circling your site before they ever fill out a form. What matters is how you’re going to use that power. Used well, it’s a neighbor doing you a favor. Used like mine was, it’s a creeper yelling “I SEE YOU” through a bullhorn and then asking for your card number.

If you’re a business owner, I’m not making a case against these tools. The only question that matters is whether you’re using them to be helpful or just showing everyone how smart you are (and a little bit of your ass too).

Technology is neither good nor bad on its own. But follow Spider-Man’s advice: With great power comes great responsibility.*

If anyone out there has ever cracked the Taco USA beef and bean burrito, contact me. Consider this a cry for help.

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*Yes, fellow comic nerds, I know technically this is inaccurate. I’m trying to make this accessible to everyone. That line first appeared in Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962), Spider-Man’s debut, written by Stan Lee, art by Steve Ditko. In the original comic it’s not actually written as Uncle Ben speaking; it’s the anonymous narrator’s caption at the very end of the story: “With great power there must also come great responsibility!” Uncle Ben saying it directly is a later invention from the adaptations (Ultimate Spider-Man comics, the Raimi movie, etc.) that’s now so ingrained everyone assumes it was always his line. Thuppppt.