Take some pride in your work. Software is literally the most in demand profession today, you don't have to work for corrupt employers. You can contribute something positive to society and still make decent money.
In some other profession I'd make exceptions, but seriously the amount of money flowing to developers these days, there's no excuse to sell out.
What you describe as a corrupt employer is anyone that uses Mailchimp, SendinBlue, MailPoet, CampaignMonitor, Dotmailer, MailGet, etc.
Do you think that companies who send newsletter do it without any traces of analytics? Every link is tracked, every image is tracked. On the web, there are heatmaps of every single mouse movement. Your keystrokes used to be tracked too, until GDPR hit. Anyone who works does analytics can play back the path visitors used to navigate on the site.
It doesn't take any advanced team to do that. You simply drop a .js file from some third-party CND in your site's head and you have all that data. Any mom ? pop shop that has a website has access to that data.
Everyone does it, that's the current state of the industry. To refuse work from anyone who does analytics would mean to leave the web industry.
> but seriously the amount of money flowing to developers these days
At the time, I was paid cad$40k/year. According to glassdoor.ca, the salary for the same position would be cad$59k/year today. Not everyone works from the inside of a bubble.
> 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.
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.
In some other profession I'd make exceptions, but seriously the amount of money flowing to developers these days, there's no excuse to sell out.