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.
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.