No to Spy Pixels | Hacker News Reader

No to Spy Pixels

notospypixels.com

54 pointsDrStrangeLoop34 comments

My knowledge might be outdated but back in 2014? Gmail decided to download and cache images embedded in an email. This meant that a tracking pixel was only downloaded once (before a user even opened an email) and every subsequent time the email was opened, the cached image was served from Gmail's servers, not the image origin server. This meant that tracking pixels became useless for Gmail (web based) users. I'm still under this impression today but maybe something has changed?

Edit: I said the pixel loads before the email is even opened. This is incorrect. The pixel loads the first time an email is read. Subsequent loads come from Gmail's servers.

That happens for some emails but I've also seen Gmail emails that activated tracking pixels normally.

Are those users using the web interface and using a Mail app to read their Gmail emails?

That's an interesting question. I might have to test to see if that's causing it.

I thought I remembered that too. According to this article (https://www.newfangled.com/how-gmail-image-caching-is-affect...) they don't fetch the image until you open it (so only subsequent reads are affected).

I get why people do this. I used to use Freshbooks for my billing. They include tracking pixels in their emails, so I could see if a client had opened their invoice or not. If a client was late, I could adjust my behavior based on that tracking pixel (if they hadn't seen it, I would just send the invoice again vs. calling and trying to hound down a payment).

That said, I don't like the idea of tracking pixels either. I turn off images in gmail/thunderbird so that people can't track my reading. Would love it if the move to get rid of these became mainstream.

You don't like the idea of it but you admit that you used them because they were useful to you.

To be clear, I didn't opt-in to using them. They were just there. But yes, the point of my post was that they were indeed useful (and I still don't like them).

The Gmail image setting is all wrong, though — it also blocks inline images.

The correct solution is trivial if Google cared to implement it: never load remote content in emails. If Google did this, then people would stop including remote content. Problem solved.

This is a valid use case, and it's a service you can get with snail mail, by sending it as "certified". Except for the fact that emails aren't particularly private, it seems reasonable that the same thing could exist for important emails. But if so, the fact that it's tracked should be as clearly exposed to the recipient as the certified snail mail envelope. Although that might not be possible to implement on top of email.

Most USPS mail carriers aren’t actually doing the proper “certified mail” operations. And especially so since COVID.

What does that have to do with anything?

I'm a bit mixed for analytics and privacy matters.

On one side, I prefer consent, limiting the amount of analytics made on me and I don't like giving my behavior for free.

On the other side, I work in a Tech startup and we need to know what users are doing / thinking. It is so important to iterate and grow quickly.

So it is the kind of stuff where I would like it to disappear, but at the same time I am a bit digging my grave.

Isn’t this the perfect description of current state of affairs :)

I use pihole and nextdns and hey.com email, all aggressively resisting advertising and targeting.

At the same time my coworkers need to report on opens and click through in their email campaigns.

Of course the site doesn't bother to mention their own spying:

    <!-- Fathom - beautiful, simple website analytics -->
    <script src="https://cdn.usefathom.com/script.js" data-site="XABBQKZP" defer></script>
    <!-- / Fathom -->

Standard email marketing best practice is to use this to see if the recipient is opening emails. If the recipient doesn’t, the sender should auto unsubscribe the recipient. Blocking tracking pixels means that the “good” email marketers will keep emailing until a manual unsubscribe event happen.

Which services automatically unsubscribe you after a period of unopened emails? I can't imagine a marketing department ever adopting that practice.

Here is an example: https://www.mailpoet.com/blog/stop-sending-emails-to-inactiv...

But there are lots of incentives here, for example in HubSpot you pay per “marketing contact” which are people to whom you can send emails. If I flag someone as not a marketing contact, it saves me money.

Surely blocking tracking pixels looks just like not opening the email, triggering the autounsubscribe. I don't see the problem here. The recipient and mailer both get what they want.

Yes and no. If a sufficient % of users do this, then you're stuck with "I guess I gotta email them since I have no way to measure engagement". Also, keep in mind that without these pixels, a sender doesn't know what their open rate is.

Open rate is a large metric of whether a sender is considered a spammer or not by Gmail and Microsoft. Without these pixels, senders have no way to benchmark their own behavior against the general ecosystem. It's like asking a runner to get better but not telling them their own mile time. Clearly there can be other solutions like if major email providers gave senders aggregate data on the open rate of emails they process for a given sender, but then you get back into the question around if this is tracking etc much like in this thread.

ProtonMail does a great job with removing trackers in email

Tutanota does this too with default image blocking:

https://tutanota.com/faq#load-images

I just have images disabled. What good are they in email?

and that doesn't mean you can't have emails with images.

if it matters they can embed the content and the images will display even if you have remote images disabled.

Ideally what I want is for all of my e-mail clients to programmatically identify spy images and auto send a form letter on my behalf. Unfortunately, I don’t always have a choice what email client I use. My work forces me to use Outlook for work emails (I have to be on my company VPN and I have to authenticate through OKTA before viewing them).

Related ongoing thread:

We Built a Meta Pixel Inspector - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33753498 - Nov 2022 (1 comment)

In my opinion, Hey never actually took off because unlike Basecamp which is great, feels like it was used by the team that made it before they actually launched it. Hey feels clunky and incoherent IMHO.

What if they are used directly by the business owner purely to make your experience better and improve their business and not fed into some big ML data-eating machine?

If you don’t like the email technology used by the provider of the commercial content you are receiving… Unsubscribe, simple.

For web browsing, doesn't the PrivacyBadger extension block tracking pixels?

It's a cat and mouse game, it is much better to disable loading images once and for all or display the plain text version of the email.

This looks like an advertisement for hey.com. It's a good service that I used for about a year. But what I really wanted was a better email client and not a new email address.

Wow, an advertisement complaining about the oldest technology on the internet for advertising. Pixel Tracking.

"If you use Hey"... And close tab.

What's more nefareous? Being advertised to through the regular channels, or this covert, hidden as help type of swindle? I hate both.

I'm not seeing a connection between Dave Smyth (https://davesmyth.com/) and Hey. I think he just mentions it because of it supports surfacing "spy pixel" use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com