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Comment by techsupporter | Hacker News Reader

This plugin is awesome but one thing I've noticed lately is several financial institutions use tracking pixels to verify e-mail addresses and if you don't open an e-mail in a way that loads the pixel once every so often, they drop you from paperless statements.

I've run into this with Capital One and Discover. Every year I have to log in and click "yes I want paperless statements" and then 11 statements later I get one in the mail with a message about "we miss you, you're not opening our e-mails so here's a paper statement unless you tell us you want e-statements and you open our e-mails." Never mind that I log into the mobile apps and web-based account management systems multiple times per month...

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To be honest, this seems like a decent check for banks to make. Based on my experience with users and the emails attached to their accounts, not all of them have an attachment to an email address that you or I might have (I haven't switched addresses in decades.) They also somehow frequently lose access to inboxes.

The banks could verify if the user is checking their mails by asking them to reply to the email or click on a link explicitly to confirm the receipt? Tracking with pixels... there's so much wrong with it that it needs a blog post of its own, and thankfully someone did just that: https://mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2019/07/superhuman-i...

Wow! I've been trying to figure out for a year why my financial institution hasn't been able to deliver me electronic statements. Every month or so it's been auto-switching back to snail mail. I even switched email services and did extensive tweaks to my spam blockers to try to figure out what was happening. Them looking at the email image-loads never occurred to me... thanks for sharing that!

This is horrific UX. Mi bank is almost 100% paperless, and once a month they send this exact mail. I read the subject (something like "You have a message with your monthly statements") and I delete the mail without opening. They never punish me for refusing to get tracked.

Pixel tracking is awful, if you do it at least show some decency and don't blame the victim if they don't fall in your trap.

Hmmm. They email you your statements? Am I getting that right? If so, that seems like a pretty big security issue.

No, they e-mail to tell me that a statement is available for viewing on their web site or mobile application. But if I don't "open" one of those e-mails every 12 months, they kick me off of paperless statements and go back to sending them via regular mail.

What's the rationale for your bank doing this? The litigation-heavy environment of its jurisdiction? Someone once sued a bank due to a loss caused by not knowing what was in their bank account, and they demonstrated that they were not 'receiving' their statements?

No idea, sadly. Capital One just started doing it a couple of years ago, the others since the beginning.

Just making sure but do you ever click through on an email link or do you just use it as a notification and then go and log in? I’m curious if they just need to be looking at click + open events or if that wouldn’t even help in this scenario.

Note, of course, that the former increases your risk of accidentally visiting a phishing site.

I kind of wish banks didn't put links in their email.

If you go to the site and log in, they have an opportunity to ask you to confirm that you still want emails.

Pretty dumb because like most clients, the #1 email client Outlook does not load these.

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