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

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.