Hey.com is onto something with its tracking-pixel blocker | Hacker News Reader

Hey.com is onto something with its tracking-pixel blocker

blog.gingerlime.com

30 pointsgingerlime32 comments

Gmail's handling of tracking pixels might be even better, it automatically downloads and caches all images in a email. This has a few benefits: 1) Renders any gmail "open rate" analytics useless 2) Makes the email load faster in your email client since images are coming from Google's fast cache https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail...

If that happens even outside the web interface that just means now Google has that data instead of the sender.

Hey, amazing thing. A Google "customer added value" is actually data-mining in disguise.

It does proxy the images, but it doesn't cache them until you open the email.

According to link below, breaking gmail's tracking is as simple as appending a query string per user/email:

https://redant.com.au/how-we-do/cache-busting-gmail-new-imag...

Reducing accuracy of open rate data is a double-edged sword. I understand the privacy concerns. But it is exceptionally useful to product and people and writers for intoning UX to know if important emails are getting read (or at least opened).

I don't believe this is totally accurate. I've received an email from an online store sent when an order was shipped, it has an image in it which updates according to the shipping status (and now the image shows as delivered). Either Google has added an exception for this retailer (unlikely) or there is a workaround.

There’s a certain irony that Basecamp’s own CRM product expounds the benefits of tracking email opens and clicks.

“The simplest system available to send an email to a group of contacts. Track opens and clicks and stay top-of-mind.“

https://highrisehq.com/features/

From the main website, which I presume you have seen:

> As of August 20, 2018, we're no longer accepting new signups for Highrise

https://highrisehq.com/

Not sure that’s valid grounds for criticism. Basecamp never ends support for products, but this one is otherwise sunset.

Yup. But they still support the feature and sold people on that benefit. So whether the product is still accepting new sign ups is neither here nor there. They are part of the “problem” that they are railing against.

Whether or not you agree with email tracking, the language feels a bit like propaganda:

"YOU'RE PROTECTED. WE BLOCKED A SPY TRACKER IN THIS THREAD"

"A spy tracker" seems a bit dramatic and it's far from a neutral description. What about just:

"This email contained a tracking image allowing the sender to see if you've opened it, we've blocked that for you."

The main use of this feature is to track open rates so that marketers can improve their marketing efforts. Block them if you disagree, but there's no reason to make it sound so nefarious.

It is nefarious if it’s ran by an ad-tech or marketing company. They also collect much more information than just the fact that the email has been opened. IP addresses & user-agents are collected as well.

Doesn’t gmail already kill this tracking? They proxy and cache all tracking images, so you don’t get originating ip or geo, I thought.

You're right: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail... Though it might be possible for marketers to still track individual email opens? https://redant.com.au/how-we-do/cache-busting-gmail-new-imag...

I believe the argument is against claiming ALL tracking is bad.

> to track open rates

Yes. Normal people call this spying and consider it an invasion of privacy.

Possibly a dumb question, but does blocking remote images not prevent this?

Not a dumb question, it does prevent it. However the majority of people enable remote images so distinguishing between images and trackers is useful.

It should, but they are an underhanded technique that deserves being made known and judged.

Not a dumb question, but not a good answer because it's too abstract (a general concept, but not tied to a particular piece of software/client -- is this a browser, or an email client?)...

The short answer is: Stopping tracking objects requires the request to be stopped before any DNS or HTTP request takes place against that object... and must not be circumvented by other software/addons that then allow it...

For instance, if you block images, but you have another addon/software (e.g. those "website accelerators" that do virtually nothing) that preloads images.. well.. how do the two addons interact? If anything sends that request, you've notified the tracking website.

Why DNS too? If I were an evil company, I'd have both DNS and HTTP checks. If you block images but still for some reason checked the DNS address, I might be able to extract some useful info because you hit uniqueTrackingUUID.example.com, despite not sending the HTTP request.

So, in short, blocking remote images _should_ help, but there's a lot more evil ways to track you... it could even be a url-loaded font (that actually doesn't exist, because it's your UUID for tracking)... or a script... In theory, if you block remote images, your software _hopefully_ blocks other stuff, but that depends on the implementation...

I use a good old “boring” email client like Mac Mail and to the best of my knowledge it doesn’t attempt DNS resolution either.

Maybe in-browser clients are different but then it’s more of a problem with that particular implementation than the concept of blocking remote content itself.

Regarding website accelerators, is that really still a thing? Never heard of those.

I don't know Mac mail. As for website acceleration, there's many forms.. there's still software people try to push that basically installs add-ons into browsers... Then there's simply add-ons you can download, which could easily do anything.

For mail clients, it comes down to implementation there as well, but it's less likely a major vendor would add tracking protection checkboxes, then fail on them too badly..... Less likely... And they usually don't have add-ons of the like that would be a problem.

One small issue: email has no delivery notification system. Once upon a time there was one (mdn) but gmail effectively killed it.

Sometimes (important notifications) I need to understand whether the email was delivered to the recipient and it was read.

What am I to do? Yes, marketers do piggyback the feature. But it's still useful.

Give me a voluntary receipt system, THEN kill tracking pixels.

Could you include a link in the email requesting confirmation of receipt by clicking on it?

This is really the only way to 100% know if your email was received. It needs agreement from the recipient though to click the button. If it's beneficial for them then I think they would.

There is a voluntary receipt system, it's called read receipts:

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/9413651?hl=en

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-and-request-r...

A tracking pixel cant possibly tell you if the email was read. It might tell you if it was opened, assuming that it works correctly, but cant differentiate between loading and actually reading. It also might fail to tell you it was opened, for example if the user blocks these trackers.

All in all, its a lousy system. If you absolutely must be sure someone has read your email, you might need to call them.

What I find worse is link tracking, since it can’t be as easily bypasses. I have a paid subscription to a newsletter and the publisher said they can’t disable link tracking because SendGrid only offers it as an account wide setting - I checked, it is.

This is the kind of stupidity that makes me hate marketing.

Can you explain what is worse about link tracking? If you're explicitly making a request to a remote service, how would you expect it to not be tracked?

1. The link becomes unreadable

2. The link now goes to a marketing.newsletter.com instead of example.com/original-story, which gives me a better signal of the quality of the citation. Wouldn't you hate it if every wikipedia citation went to bit.ly instead?

3. My "intent" is to read the information behind the original link, if I can't do that without being tracked by a the sender of the email - I'm less likely to click the link.

4. Email isn't meant to be tracked! Clicking on a link in an email I got should not notify the sender, in any way whatsover. If this is true for my personal emails, why is it not true for company emails?

If you are interested in a newsletter, i'm advising you to not block them.

You are really screwing with readable metrics, not only for marketing. But for people who do A-Z for their newsletter.

The vast majority of people will stick using Gmail, so aggregated metrics won't be skewed that much.

However I definitely wants to mess with the fine tracking like Intercom does for example, where they can pull out data about a specific client and see what communication he read or didn't read, how long he stayed on it, etc

Reply on news.ycombinator.com