Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 341 posts

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#71

Post by tomtheelder »

Nextgrid wrote: post #66
relix wrote: post #50

If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…

I'm not sure why people would be wary of clicking the unsubscribe link on something they explicitly subscribed to in the first place. I mean, they trusted you enough to give you their email address to subscribe in the first place, right? The only scenario I can think of is when people didn't intentionally subscribe or were coerced into subscribing and those newsletters can go to hell and fully deserve to be marked as…

I think the original commenter really did mean weary and not wary. It's just a pain to be constantly unsubscribing from things, most of which you probably didn't intentionally subscribe to in the first place.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#72

Post by achairapart »

relix wrote: post #50

If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…

And also because of this, if you're blocking tracking pixels in a privacy conscious way you often get removed from the mailing list without any notice, which is very frustrating.

Or you get one of those mail saying "We are removing you from the list because you don't read our newsletter", often without offering any other confirmation signal. Basically they says "Let us track you or you are out of this list".

And this is also the result of marketing people who look at ways to increase the "good numbers", more likely to show to their bosses. They don't actually care if you read or enjoy their content, you are either one of the users who increase their opening and click rates, or you're a useless burden to them.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#73

Post by [deleted] »

thepete2 wrote: post #64
phreack wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I get weary of going through the unsubscribe route is that it's always a gray-on-white link incredibly hidden at the bottom of the email, like every single time. It's a miracle it's there at all. It'd be much simpler to have it at the top and actually visible by eyes instead, if you just want to keep engaged users on your list.

There should be an unsubscribe email header for newsletters. Then it could even be a feature for mail clients.

[deleted]

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#74

Post by nickff »

Nextgrid wrote: post #66
relix wrote: post #50

If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…

I'm not sure why people would be wary of clicking the unsubscribe link on something they explicitly subscribed to in the first place. I mean, they trusted you enough to give you their email address to subscribe in the first place, right? The only scenario I can think of is when people didn't intentionally subscribe or were coerced into subscribing and those newsletters can go to hell and fully deserve to be marked as…

People often forget what they signed up for, especially if the newsletter is relatively infrequent. This is to be expected, given the large volume of newsletters and spam.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#75

Post by cm2187 »

musicale wrote: post #21
wahern wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GMail displays them. It uses a proxy for downloading, but I don't think that matters unless they're preloading all images unconditionally upon server-side receipt of the message. Apple's macOS Mail.app client displays external images by default, as does their iOS app.

I'm somewhat disappointed that Apple doesn't offer better default privacy for Mail. Perhaps they can't figure out a good solution to differentiate between benign images and tracking images; it does seem like it would be nearly impossible to do so, but I wouldn't mind a) blocking external images by default, b) per-sender/recipient settings, and c) clearly displaying "invisible" images and warning about them. Perhaps s…

I think images stored as attachment aren't really a problem. If you really need to have images and care about the privacy of your users, just do that.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#76

Post by jeroenhd »

I wonder if these are even legal I'd er the GDPR. There's no opt-in for these tracking pixels yet they track user behaviour through a third party that knows personally identifiable information (an email address). The BBC article says this shouldn't be happening, but with the UK abandoning the EU I don't know how close to the GDPR the UK is willing to keep their laws.

I hope some data processing agency will look into these tracking companies. Without an optional opt-in at sign-up, emails should never include these pixels.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#77

Post by m_eiman »

officialjunk wrote: post #44
sep_field wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

on iOS: turn that off with Settings > Mail > Load remote images

recently i am seeing certain images still loaded, whereas in the past none loaded. i haven’t investigated what is different about these images yet, though. anyone else observe similar?

Could be images with image data included in the email, that don't need to load remotely.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#78

Post by corty »

thepete2 wrote: post #64
phreack wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I get weary of going through the unsubscribe route is that it's always a gray-on-white link incredibly hidden at the bottom of the email, like every single time. It's a miracle it's there at all. It'd be much simpler to have it at the top and actually visible by eyes instead, if you just want to keep engaged users on your list.

There should be an unsubscribe email header for newsletters. Then it could even be a feature for mail clients.

There is, just many email marketing people leave it out to cut down on the unsubscribe rate. Subscribing has to be easy and in-the-face (like those 'helpful' popups on websites), unsubscribing has to be almost impossible. Not totally impossible, mind you, because otherwise courts get angry.

Better email clients know to use the header, and e.g. gmail even asks about properly unsubscribing when marking a newsletter with that header as spam iirc.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#79

Post by jeroenhd »

thepete2 wrote: post #64
phreack wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the reasons I get weary of going through the unsubscribe route is that it's always a gray-on-white link incredibly hidden at the bottom of the email, like every single time. It's a miracle it's there at all. It'd be much simpler to have it at the top and actually visible by eyes instead, if you just want to keep engaged users on your list.

There should be an unsubscribe email header for newsletters. Then it could even be a feature for mail clients.

Gmail has this, it's in one of the dropdown menus. If you mark something with the right email header as spam, it even ask if you wish to unsubscribe instead.

Spam companies often use this to check if the email address they've targeted is real because they get callbacks from legitimate users. I've only seen one or two legitimate uses of the header as far as I can remember.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#80

Post by Nextgrid »

eric4smith wrote: post #40

For legitimate email marketers these pixels are important to have because: 1. Helps to prune users who never open emails thus giving you a smaller more engaged list. 2. Helps to see if the content they are sending to users is leading to engagement so they can send better emails next time. Yes, yes I know. Why even send emails in the first place. All email marketing is not evil. But legitimate marketers have businesse…

"engagement" is a proxy for "wasting their time". That's not something your recipients benefit from.
Post reply on HN