How do you handle other people's info pre-populating in forms?

Anonymous
Not applicable

How do you handle other people's info pre-populating in forms?

Every so often we get an email in reply to an email, or via support or legal of a lead/customer freaking out about someone else's info showing up pre-populated in a form. It's not always a specific tracking link URL, but maybe at some point, they were forwarded an email or shared a link w/ tracking tags onto their blog or social media. Other 'friends' click on it, and are confused by it, let the original recipient know. He starts freaking out thinking that we have some sort of security breach and raises hell to me, or support or legal.

How do you typically respond in a way that doesn't creep people out about our Big Brotherly ways? My customers are typically hyper-conscious about privacy.

So far, I've been responding to these as one-offs, but need to craft a standard response for our support team and others to use. Here's on I used today:

You probably were shared a personalized URL from a newsletter or email. Our forms and certain web pages utilize cookies and custom URLs to enhance your web experience (usually), so you don't need to enter the same information over and over for subsequent sign ups. In certain instances when emails are forwarded around, the analytics code thinks the forwarded recipient is the original recipient.
 
 
If you are on a shared computer, it's typically a good idea to clear your cookies and cache when you are done with your session. These forms will never ask for password information to your Turnitin accounts.

Do you have a formal response for this?
Tags (1)
1 REPLY 1
Anonymous
Not applicable

Re: How do you handle other people's info pre-populating in forms?

Fortunately we haven't had much of a problem with this partially because we market to marketers, so they expect  and understand that kind of behavior.  Sadly this may become less of a problem for everyone soon as the upcoming versions of most browsers will have do-not-track or privacy settings enabled by default.