Using an analytics pixel is _not_ an invitation to crawl a website.
Using an analytics pixel is _not_ an invitation to crawl a website.
Making something available to the public is not the same as going to the google webmaster tools and telling them to index your page.
This isn't your house where there are police patrolling and ready to respond at a moment's notice when they're called. This is the Internet, accessible by almost literally everyone on the planet, and they don't give a shit about your policy. That's why best practices and application security was invented. So use it.
That's your server complying with the request. Whether by intent or by oversight, doesn't matter: the client comes and asks, and your server can refuse. If it complies, well, you told it to. Whether you have merely exposed the page to the public or also shouted its URL from the rooftops, that's completely irrelevant. If it's not supposed to be public, don't make it public.
"Hello, I am a HTTP client, can I have /some/super/secret/page?" "Oh, but you are ^User-agent$=.acebook ? Nope, 403 Forbidden, no data for you." (Or, more generally, "And who are you? 401 Authorize!" - or any other sort of mandatory access control)
there are conventions and reasonable expectations, until now I did not expect that a tracking-pixel would be the basis for crawling, so far most crawlers tend to crawl whats publicly linked, not whats potentially publicly reachable if one knows every url there is
There are common conventions (not always followed) around robots.txt and what files to crawl, but I'm not aware of any rules or conventions or standards around URL discovery. Plenty of crawlers attempt to crawl every registered domain name, for example.
"DOS Attack" is sort of a loaded term since it implies malice. Clearly running a web server doesn't mean you invite malicious attacks (though perhaps you should expect them). Some people consider Googlebot to be a DOS attack since it can easily bring poorly designed sites to their knees.