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by admax88q 2601 days ago
> Do you think that companies who send newsletter do it without any traces of analytics?

I don't doubt it.

> Everyone does it, that's the current state of the industry.

That's not an excuse

> To refuse work from anyone who does analytics would mean to leave the web industry.

Analytics as a whole is not the issue. Doing shit like abusing CSS in order to track when someone opens an email and what they do in that email is evil. That violates the user's trust and expectations. I don't doubt that any time I spend on somebodies website will be tracked and analyzed by them. But they have no right to track and analyze me on my own properties, like while reading my own email.

"Everybody is doing it" is not an excuse for evil behaviour. Be better than others, don't contribute to this race to the bottom.

59k a year is a very healthy salary. I know real Engineers doing things like verifying building and bridges who make less than that. Honestly to think that $59k a year in Canada is too little money to afford a moral compass shows how much of a bubble you are already in.

1 comments

This tracking is made by tracking when someone loads an image from our server.

When their device calls our server, we have access to this person's basic information. Usually this information isn't aggregated but only counted to know how many users opened the email.

That's the equivalent of a caller id. This is the less hurtful and evil method of tracking I can think of.

I don't understand why you are so outraged from it.

Nobody is forcing you to open the newsletter email titled "AMAZING deal from [brand], get ONE FREE if you purchase THREE!" that you just received and much less to click the "request images in this email" button.

I could understand your point if we were talking about "Canvas Fingerprinting" where an invisible image is generated and the user's GPU is singled out to an unique token by exploiting the unique hardware information outputted during the rendering of the image, allowing you to track user across browsers, sites, logins and even after a software format or operating system reset.

However right now I'm merely talking about tracking the number of hits our server receive for "banner-image.jpg". This is not even information unique to the viewer.

> Nobody is forcing you to open the newsletter email titled

And nobody is forcing you to invade users privacy.

> We used to do that to track emails. Gmail's fix was to cache the emails' images on their own server,

The fact that you call what gmail did a "fix" shows that you know what you're doing is not okay.