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I’m not really satisfied with Steve’s explanation of the tracking pixel in his emails. It seems to be more along the lines of “It’s OK because you asked me to do this” (I did?) instead of “here’s why this is necessary functionality”. I’m a little disappointed by this response. Asking someone to email me updates about their work is not the same as approving any sort of tracking of said email. I don’t enable read receipts because I’m not a huge fan of the idea. If you need to know whether or not I read your email, ask and I’ll tell you. GRC is no exception to this philosophy. If you’re looking for analytics in the future, send a survey!
If there’s absolutely necessary functionality, that’s one thing. Otherwise I fail to see why GRC gets a pass here. The pixel seems unnecessary, so maybe it should be removed.
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Well, I guess you can “unworry” now, because he’s decided to remove any tracking according to a recent post on his newsgroup. 
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I have no problem with a developer trying out new things. His explanation was just lousy.
Either way, this is the right move considering his audience and the network he’s broadcasting through.
For commercial mailing lists (i.e. ones that use a commercial list mailing service), one of the biggest bits about the pixel is to see whether you open the email at all. They pay per email that is sent, so if they have 1,000s of recipients who don’t even open the email, that is money down the drain.
I have one mailing list, where I regularly get an email asking if I am still interested in the list, because I haven’t “read” his emails in a while. The truth is, I have read them, but at home on my Mac and I have a PiHole doing DNS, which blocks the tracking service the sending service uses (it was just on a tracking blacklist, I didn’t add it myself).
In Steve’s case, it seems it was more just curiosity, what he could do. I’m glad he has “come to his senses,” as it were.
I would guess that the majority of Security Now listeners use an email client that doesn’t load those pixels.
I use Mailmate on macOS and claws or mutt on Linux to view email text only - I never even open HTML let alone image pixels of any size.
In any event, the tracking pixel was on by default with the Nuevo mailer Steve was using, but as he said, he has turned it off.
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