Why is Backblaze tracking me?

Wow. They clearly stated why they were generally tracking the messages, so that they could show that somebody read the message about all your files being deleted.

You could argue that they should go out-of-band (phone call, registered letter) but that gets into weird situations (customer has died, employee was fired).

I'm using Firefox with uBlock Origin, a Pi-Hole equivalent, etc. I get wanting to protect your privacy but this seems reasonable. If it really bothers you, have images turned off in your email by default.

No relationship to Backblaze other than buying a second account for my in-laws since they don't know how to back up their Windows machine.

> Especially after I explicitly voice my concerns over this tracking, yet I’m not given an option to opt-out of it.

vs

> 1) You may alter the settings on your email system to receive such emails as text, this will remove all tracking,

Of course it should be opt-in in the first place.

Kudos to Hey for making this kind of tracking evident and blocking it. Anyone know if there's a simple way to add this feature to Gmail?

If this is a violation of GDPR, then it seems like the least bad violation possible.

You would be surprised to know that every email from a company has pixel trackers. Each image loaded with Sendgrid, etc is a unique URL that logs everything.

And no they do not viotate GDPR.

Your IP address is not revealed when using Gmail, hey.com. The only info revealed is when/if you opened it.

Sony and Facebook appear to be quite shitty at email tracking because they embed 27 transparent pixels. All of which can be attained with one pixel.

Facebook is very very sneaky with pixels. When you download your account data as a zip file, they embed pixels in that too. To see whether you actually go through the account data and what pages of your account data you may have accessed. Open the zip only after turning off the internet.