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Please also stop tracking email open events Zoom

3 points by techthumb ↗ HN
Hey Zoom,

As part of you clean up, could you please also stop tracking email opens?

<img src="http://email.zoom.us/track/open.php?u=30854053&id=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" height="1" width="1">

4 comments

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Hackbraten
Shenanigans like these made me disallow remote image requests in my email client.
Nextgrid
This used to be the default. I'm still surprised the default on iOS is to allow remote content considering their pro-privacy stance.
sethammons
Tracking email opens allows senders to gauge engagement with sends, giving them feedback such as non-engaged users. When users don't engage with the emails, inboxes can penalize the senders. By having open data, it helps senders trim off non-engaged users to keep their mail relevant for interested recipients.

Genuine question: what's the bad part of tracking opens? The only thing I can think of is "I just don't want them to know I opened it." Which, I guess is fair. But in the current email landscape, that means inboxes like Gmail may start sending more legit mail to spam boxes due to bad engagement metrics on their end.

Nextgrid
> what's the bad part of tracking opens?

I don't want the sender to know at what times I open the e-mails, from which e-mail clients/browsers and networks. That is none of their business. In most cases I wouldn't care, but certain people in certain cases may have reasons not to share this information. There's also no telling whether this information is then passed on to someone else like an ad network or marketing platform.

I believe major e-mail providers already provide aggregated data to senders about how their e-mails are classified; this is Microsoft's for example: https://sendersupport.olc.protection.outlook.com/snds/