Live data from Hacker News

No to Spy Pixels

notospypixels.com

1–10 of 37 posts

Re: No to Spy Pixels

#3
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.

Re: No to Spy Pixels

#5
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).

Re: No to Spy Pixels

#6
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.

Re: No to Spy Pixels

#7
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.

Re: No to Spy Pixels

#8
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.

Re: No to Spy Pixels

#10

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.
Post reply on HN