title: Tracking pixels
description: Concerning a notice in the privacy policy of an HR app
pubDate: 2024-04-10

content: |
  I recently made the mistake of reading the privacy policy of the HR app my
  employer uses. Take this choice excerpt:
  
  > **Tracking Pixels**
  >
  > We may place tracking pixels in our Applicant Tracking System (ATS). These
  > pixels are used for analytics purposes, including to track statistical
  > information around when an email sent to you is opened.
  
  Translation:
  
  > We reserve the right to know whether you have read our emails, how long you
  > spent reading them, at what time and in what physical location you read them,
  > and any other information we can get our hands on. We reserve the right to do
  > this as soon as you open an email, without asking for your permission first,
  > and ask for your forgiveness later. That is, if you ever find out: which you
  > won't, because we also reserve the right to hide this information in a Privacy
  > Policy which we know you won't read, and we design our data-harvesting monster
  > to be completely undetectable to anyone except determined experts, on purpose.
  > We reserve the right to leave this data lying unused in a data warehouse where
  > someone might steal it, and we also reserve the right to use it, if we can
  > think of something satisfactorily dastardly to do with it. On the bright side,
  > we probably won't, so having your data leaked to hackers and fraudsters is
  > probably the worst you have to worry about. Unless we sell your data to
  > advertisers, or a ~black hole of stolen data~ Large Language Model. Oh yeah,
  > we probably reserve the right to do that, too. We doubt anyone will ever check.
