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Comment by jonplackett | Hacker News Reader

Why can't apple just allow some kind of pixel that doesn't reveal user identity, or strip user identity from what's already being used.

I don't really mind someone knowing I opened an email, just like I'm fine with a website knowing I visited (say using plausible.io rather than google analytics). I get that that's useful to them for non-nefarious reasons.

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"Read receipts" are already part of e-mail and supported by every email client I am aware of. There is already a well-supported way to track whether e-mail has been successfully opened or not without using subversive tracking pixels.

The reason businesses don't rely on them is supposedly because "too many users disabled or rejected them during the past decade".

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3798

The two best mail clients, mutt and whatever people like that runs as part of emacs now, don't have read receipts at all.

Even MS Outlook lets end users decline to send read receipts. There's probably some awful group policy system to force it, though.

I feel like there is a body of literature waiting to be written about businesses refusing to take a hint in favor of user-hostile decisions. These things are conscious choices by the senders and they had several meetings about it.

Apple can't strip identity from the existing trackers because there's not a separate and distinct part of the tracker that encodes the user identity. It's integral to the tracker itself, which makes this an all-or-nothing proposition.

I guessed it would just be some url variables on the end of each image, is that not how it works?

Sure. But if you strip those out, then the pixel itself no longer has any value to anyone.

Or can't you just load it but with a proxy - they get to know it got opened but from a fake IP.

A common technique is that somewhere in the email you'll see something like:

The image filename is a UUID. The UUID is of course unique for each email sent, but the Web server is configured to serve the same image for any given UUID (after recording the UUID as an "open" into a database).

There isn't a way for an email client to be certain that the image is or isn't a tracking pixel.

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