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Comment by simmons | Hacker News Reader

Ah, this brings back memories. I signed up for Caller ID when it was first available to me in 1994. Not only did I have the regular caller ID box, but thanks to a fancy modem that could interpret the caller ID encoding, I rigged a daemon to send a zephyrgram instant message with the caller's name and number to my Sun workstation at work.

I distinctly remember people being a bit unnerved when I'd call them back and say "Hey, I saw you called...". My girlfriend at the time was particularly disturbed that I'd know she called even when she didn't leave a message. People were used to treating unanswered calls as if they never happened, and felt a bit violated when you knew that they had been investing effort into contacting you instead of making a casual "what's up?" call.

It's very strange to think about such attitudes in the context of modern communication. :)

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Zephyrgram - that's a name I've not heard in a long time. For those unfamiliar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zephyr_(protocol)

This reminds me of the age of Call Back Verifiers for BBS identity checking.

Wow. Now _that's_ something I've not even thought about in decades. Those were irritating when trying to BBS in somewhere at 2AM and you didn't want to wake the whole house. (Not many of us had dedicated data lines then.)

I remember one of my local BBSes had a busted call back that would occasionally call multiple times or after a random (and often very long) delay.

So much of that era is just forgotten now (and that's not necessarily a bad thing...).

Not that different than consumers using tracking pixels to see open time/place.

I use streak CRM for gmail and have learned to not mention the details of what I see so as to not freak people out. The funny thing is, I can see 0.00001% of what the commercial trackers can see, but people don't bat an eye on that. They allow images to appear on emails by default, they don't block javascript, they keep all the tracking cookies no their machine, etc.

Consumers are not the ones using tracking pixels

Consumer here checking in who does use tracking pixels. Yes, I'm a consultant, but all my emails go out with tracking, it's how I have it set up.

I've been on the receiving end of this from one or two online invitation services (Paperless Post, maybe?). Had a friend say "can you come to my party or what? You're the only one that still hasn't opened the invitation email". I never had to sign up for an account to imagine what the service was doing - showing "opened" stats straight out of Sendgrid or the like.

I had a similar reaction - email open tracking is something you assume, by default, that regular individuals can't do. And I found it very invasive, even though I know the same tracking exists on all the non-personal email I received.

Since then I've made it a point not to open those invitations until I know I'm ready to respond - since "I never saw the email" is a less harmful conclusion for my snooping friend to draw than "I opened the email and decided not to respond."

Just make it so that images don't appear by default. I only open images if I want to. Opening an email... I can't possibly understand why anyone would allow images to open by default. Based on the people I communicate with, less than 5% block image opening.

Also, I don't get why I'm being downvoted.

If that becomes more common, I will have to just only use Thunderbird, with its build in blocking tools, because it is one of the features I loath most in Facebook Messenger.

Gmail proxies image downloads, right? And it doesn't wait for actual email open so how do you do open time / place?

Not sure, as I said, I use streak CRM. I know they use pixel image based tracking. Exactly how they do it, I'm not 100% sure. I know you need to give it 'access' within your gmail, so I'm guessing it's something within gmails ability to 'play nice' with apps (API based? not sure) - Though your comment has now got me curious.

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