PixelBlock
Security and privacy
email tracking blocker
SHOW HN2014
How HN took it
3 positive, 2 neutral or asking, 1 mixed, 5 critical, out of 11 comments about the project. Thread score -0.17.
Performance: 0 for, 4 againstPrivacy: 2 for, 1 againstDesign: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Simple and useful
From 1 comment
Personally, I find this very simple and useful. Great Job!
sophsterq on HN
Objections
Extensions with Gmail access are a security and privacy risk
From 2 comments
Chrome plugins pose a HUGE security problem. This one, for example, gets access to your GMail account. Do you want that? What else could this plugin do since it can read your…
claudiusd on HNI'm wary of installing an extension that can access my data in gmail. Is the source code available anywhere? Edit1: Found a chrome extension that lets me view the source code of…
hughes on HN
Gmail image caching may make the extension redundant
From 2 comments
Does this even work considering Gmail pre-fetches all the images nowadays?
Kiro on HNI'm not the author, but tracking doesn't work at all – this extension is 100% redundant.
ChristianBundy on HN
Requests
Publish the source code
From 2 comments
I'm wary of installing an extension that can access my data in gmail. Is the source code available anywhere? Edit1: Found a chrome extension that lets me view the source code of…
hughes on HNPerhaps if I threw this on github people could see the code themselves, or better yet; run the extension in dev mode so they can 100% be sure they know the code running.…
ramoq on HN
Move blocking logic to background script at webRequest level
From 1 comment
Edit2: Good catch Edit3: Technically yes, but I should move the blocking logic to the background script completely (webRequest level) [Edit - fixed the Show Original styling issue]
ramoq on HN
Questions
Does it still catch tracking after Gmail image prefetching and caching?
From 2 comments
Does this even work considering Gmail pre-fetches all the images nowadays?
Kiro on HNHere is an article explaining gmail new caching of images. http://blog.mailchimp.com/how-gmails-image-caching-affects-o... Tracking still works and this extension is useful as…
timl88 on HN
Can tracking images that are not 1x1 pixels be detected?
From 1 comment
When I wrote email tracking software about 7 years ago, I dropped the 1x1 pixel, because of spam filters tripping over them. I just used any image in the email to track you and…
mooij on HN
Alternatives named
Turning off image loading by default
From 1 comment
Another potential solution to block 'read receipts' is to turn off image loading by default. Its not ideal - because you don't know what images will load until you load them so…
alooPotato on HN
Mailtrackerapp
From 1 comment
Are you sure about this? There are apps that do exactly this: http://mailtrackerapp.com
enos_feedler on HN