[zbentley]

This would cause serious negative consequences for users (in rather a lot of the world) on slow or bandwidth-limited internet connections.

[mcv]

If your connection is so slow that background images are a problem, then don't load background images at all. That also fixes the problem.

If you want to prevent this kind of spying, the solution is to load these kind of interactive background images either always or never, but not on the interaction they're supposed to track.