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Wow, I never heard of Pixel Tracking. That sounds super evil. Are there browser plugins to fight back on this one?

• dandelion_lover 10y ago
  I use RequestPolicy. It prevents a web-site to call another web-site unless I allow.
• r3bl 10y ago
  They're an even bigger thing in emails. Usually, companies would include a pixel from an external resource and then figure out if you've read the email or not by looking at was that image loaded or not. IIRC, GitHub does that. If you read the email of some notification, it won't show you that notification in your notifications. The solution is to block external image loading in your email client (I know that Thunderbird has that, and I know that Zoho's email client on Android has that).
  • littlehood 10y ago
    Gmail does something to divert it - it downloads all the resources once and CDNs them for you, so the email author can't see who and where opened the email.
  • username223 10y ago
    Yep, tracking pixels are among the oldest forms of internet surveillance, predating the far more aggressive and intrusive JavaScript companies use today. They're one of the reasons why most mail clients don't load images by default. They only give information on page loads, not obsessive behavior tracking, but they're harder to block. They're why I block doubleclick.net, google-analytics.com, etc. in my hosts file rather than just blocking their JavaScript.
• dvfjsdhgfv 10y ago
  Adblockers such as uBlock already block many of these since they're hosted by ad agencies. If someone is determined they can bypass the filter easily though; you'd need a static filter for each of these then. The only global solution would be to block all remote images which would likely break many websites. Also, nowadays so many sophisticated tracking methods exist I'm not sure it's worth the hassle.
• Grangar 10y ago
  Check out Ghostery.
• Sir_Substance 10y ago
  My standard internet security suite is ublock origin, noscript, self-destructing cookies, privacy badger and httpseverywhere. Privacybadger does an ok job against tracking pixels. It uses machine learning to try to detect when a specific url or domain seems to be "following" you around the internet, which could indicate a tracking pixel among other things. It then blocks these entities and gives you the option to override. And yes, I do think tracking pixels are super evil. It could be standard for websites to have a bar at the bottom with little logos[1] showing the companies that are tracking you, with the logos being the remote-loaded content. The fact that these companies feel compelled to make it 1x1 transparent pixels tells me very clearly that they know they are doing something people don't want them to do, because they've gone out of their way to hide it. It's a clear misuse of browser capabilities, yet they do it anyway. What a pack of cunts they are. [1] or textual short names company ticker style if you want to minimize bandwidth