It's most likely a bug. Some dev added tracking to all the href's and just didn't think about phone numbers. The title of the article sounds like they did it on purpose, which i doubt.

I'd argue that it is not a bug - it is a wrong assumption (that all URLs are http/https) based on limited experience.

With a typical bug code works not as author intended it to work. Numbers of such bugs can be reduced by testing and better tooling. But software development as an industry creates incentive to be overconfident and not to question own assumptions: developers who don't stop to read documentation/standards/gather information in anther way deliver more features in less time.

Yeah that's what it seems like to me. Just a case of doing it wrong.

It's a process breakdown, either manual or automated. Marketing teams tend to use a tagging worksheet like this[1] when creating new emails. They're just told to put all links through that process, and the topic of tel links don't really come up. I've handed off dozens of link generators like that to marketing and account management folks, and never thoguht to add any checking for tel links in the logic or to surface that edge case in the instructions.

So if they're going through the motions they were told to, but don't fully understand why (and don't QA properly) this is what you end up with.

Could also be a system using the same logic of surfacing every <a> tag link for tagging before deployment (based on the utm names, there's at least some type of semantic logic to the naming that indicates a person was involved at some level and knew it was a phone number they were tagging).

[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1xDl9GdpuWB9kzXzWxKj3...

To add to the parent: Most major marketing automation and email marketing tools are going to add these links automatically in the email builder.

Most WYSIWYG email builders built into these tools are pretty painful to begin with, and especially so when content with links is copied from one tool to another. (Think of the poor marketing person being given various blurbs in Word, Gmail, etc. and told to make a functional email out of them while having to use a shitty WYSIWYG.)

Beyond that, most marketers I know have absolutely zero input into what email platform they use. Many organizations are stuck using antiquated, broken tools (I'm looking squarely at you, Eloqua) because of complex existing integrations they have set up.

I don't see this changing any time soon. Few marketing orgs have the IT budget and/or on-staff knowhow to fix this problem. Nor are they likely to be aware of it. Nor, for that matter, are they likely to prioritize it over the many more pressing things they could be fixing that more directly affect revenue.