Why shouldn't content providers be free to monitor usage if it's legal and easy to do? Would you next start to argue SaaS providers shouldn't have any Web server logs at all since it's a way of "tracking" users?
For the same reason that sending me a postcard doesn't entitle you to enter my house and take an inventory of my fridge. To get that information about a user, you should need informed consent, not just a marketer's wistful greed. That same "why not?" attitude is exactly the same bullshit user-contemptuous line of thinking that the NSA and the FBI use with their "intercept it all and let God sort it out" eavesdropping schemes.
If I choose to visit a website hosted by a server operated by someone else, that server is involved and can do whatever it wants.
If a piece of content is delivered to me via the mail, I should be able to open a cached version as many times as I want without any request to the remote server.
And the cached version can be built for me by my mail system, which by ALWAYS fetching the resources protects me.
As a question of what SHOULD happen, I thinkread receipts should be voluntary.
If a piece of content is delivered to me via the mail, I should be able to open a cached version as many times as I want without any request to the remote server. And the cached version can be built for me by my mail system, which by ALWAYS fetching the resources protects me.
Agreed, and not even the server has to do that, any good e-mail client could (as it seems Gmail is now starting to do).
