Blog post: tracking pixels

src/content/blog/2024/04/10/tracking_pixels.md

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+---
+title: Tracking pixels
+description: Concerning a notice in the privacy policy of an HR app
+pubDate:
+  year: 2024
+  month: 04
+  day: 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.