Wow. They clearly stated why they were generally tracking the messages, so that they could show that somebody read the message about all your files being deleted.
You could argue that they should go out-of-band (phone call, registered letter) but that gets into weird situations (customer has died, employee was fired).
I'm using Firefox with uBlock Origin, a Pi-Hole equivalent, etc. I get wanting to protect your privacy but this seems reasonable. If it really bothers you, have images turned off in your email by default.
No relationship to Backblaze other than buying a second account for my in-laws since they don't know how to back up their Windows machine.
You would be surprised to know that every email from a company has pixel trackers. Each image loaded with Sendgrid, etc is a unique URL that logs everything.
And no they do not viotate GDPR.
Your IP address is not revealed when using Gmail, hey.com. The only info revealed is when/if you opened it.
Sony and Facebook appear to be quite shitty at email tracking because they embed 27 transparent pixels. All of which can be attained with one pixel.
Facebook is very very sneaky with pixels. When you download your account data as a zip file, they embed pixels in that too. To see whether you actually go through the account data and what pages of your account data you may have accessed. Open the zip only after turning off the internet.
Why would they not violate the GDPR? These tracking pixels inherently collect personal information such as IP address (and more details like user-agent).
The fact that some e-mail services like Hey or Gmail neutralize them doesn't suddenly make that okay, as people with email services that don't have countermeasures against that still end up being tracked.
You could argue that they should go out-of-band (phone call, registered letter) but that gets into weird situations (customer has died, employee was fired).
I'm using Firefox with uBlock Origin, a Pi-Hole equivalent, etc. I get wanting to protect your privacy but this seems reasonable. If it really bothers you, have images turned off in your email by default.
No relationship to Backblaze other than buying a second account for my in-laws since they don't know how to back up their Windows machine.