Linked List: February 23, 2021

Tuesday, 23 February 2021

BBC News: ‘Spy Pixels in Emails Have Become Endemic’ 

Speaking of Hey, BBC News ran a piece on email spy pixels last week:

The use of “invisible” tracking tech in emails is now “endemic”, according to a messaging service that analysed its traffic at the BBC’s request. Hey’s review indicated that two-thirds of emails sent to its users’ personal accounts contained a “spy pixel”, even after excluding for spam. […]

Defenders of the trackers say they are a commonplace marketing tactic. And several of the companies involved noted their use of such tech was mentioned within their wider privacy policies.

“It’s in our privacy policy” is nonsense when it comes to email spy pixels. It’s nonsense for most privacy policies, period, because most privacy policies are so deliberately long, opaque, and abstruse as to be unintelligible. But with email they’re absurd. The recipient of an email containing a tracking pixel never agreed to any privacy policy from the sender.

And “it’s a commonplace marketing tactic” is not a defense. It’s an excuse, but it’s a shitty one. It just shows how out of control the entire tracking industry is. Their justification for all of it is, effectively, “It’s pervasive so it must be OK.” That’s like saying back in the 1960s that most people smoke so it must be safe. Or that most people don’t wear seat belts so that must be safe.

Emails pixels can be used to log:

  • if and when an email is opened
  • how many times it is opened
  • what device or devices are involved
  • the user’s rough physical location, deduced from their internet protocol (IP) address - in some cases making it possible to see the street the recipient is on

Hey’s default blocking of spy pixels — along with displaying a prominent badge shaming the sender for using them — is one of its best features. Apple should take a long hard look at Mail and the way that it does nothing to protect users’ privacy from these trackers. They’re insidious and offensive.

‘Hey, World!’ 

Jason Fried, on an experimental blogging service Basecamp has built into their email service Hey:

So we set out to do it. To test the theory. And over the last few weeks we built it into HEY, our new email service. We’re calling the feature HEY World. This post you’re reading right now is the world’s first HEY World post. And I published it by simply emailing this text directly to [email protected] from my [email protected] account. That was it.

For now, this remains an experiment. I’ve got my own HEY World blog, and David has his. We’re going to play for a while. And, if there’s demand, we’ll roll this out to anyone with a personal @hey.com account. It feels like Web 1.0 again in all the right ways. And it’s about time.

Speaking of Web 1.0, HEY World pages are lighting fast. No javascript, no tracking, no junk. They’re a shoutout to simpler times. Respect.

You can subscribe to a Hey World blog via email (of course) or RSS. Feels as though simple stuff — like RSS — is experiencing a renaissance.

‘Hello, World’ 

MIT’s Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Lab:

Today’s the day that “hello world” said “hello world!”

The term was coined in a textbook published #otd in 1978: “C Programming Language,” written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie.

Tweeted yesterday, so it’s no longer “on this day”, sorry, but interesting history nonetheless.

I still write “Hello, world” as a first exercise in any new language or programming environment. Not a superstition per se, but more like a talisman. Just seems like the right thing to do.

The C Programming Language is a wonderfully-written book. It explains the basics of C better than anything I’ve ever seen. C is a weird, hard language but K&R describe it with joy. It’s a serious book written in a conversational style.

‘I’m Being Censored, and You Can Read, Hear, and See Me Talk About It in the News, on the Radio, and on TV’ 

Eli Grober, writing for McSweeney’s:

Hi there, thanks for reading this. I’m being censored. That’s why I’m writing a piece in a major publication that you are consuming easily and for free. Because I am being absolutely and completely muzzled.

Also, I just went on a massively-watched TV show to let you know that my voice is being down-right suffocated. I basically can’t talk to anyone. Which is why I’m talking to all of you.

As Jeanetta Grace Susan has convincingly argued, conservative voices are being silenced.