# Tracking pixels

Concerning a notice in the privacy policy of an HR app

Published on: 10 Apr 2024

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.

