Let’s talk about in-app tracking

If you use any content blockers, they most likely work only with your web browser. Some utilities now also offer the ability to block user tracking that occurs within an app on your phone or tablet. On my iPhone and iPad, I use 1Blocker, which has performed really well. When they added in-app tracker blocking, I was surprised to find a side effect/benefit:

I’m subscribed to a number of publications, and most of those offer the ability to receive regular emails with stories of interest. Clicking on a link within the email leads to the story on the media site. Suddenly, those links for some media sites started failing to resolve: instead of the content I was expecting, I get “Safari cannot load the page because the server cannot be found.” WTF?

It turns out that some of these media sites (I’m looking at you TheAtlantic and you, Axios) have started using a service called “sentry.io”, which embeds itself into emails from a media provider and then acts as a middleman to extract tracking info before passing the connection on.

Here’s what this looks like when clicking a link in an email from Axios:

To most users, this is invisible — they may notice a brief look at a URL like “link.Axios.com” that quickly redirects to the content they were expecting.

I’ve tried (really tried) to reach out to these media organizations to offer my opinion about this practice — but I never even reached the point where I could use a term like “scummy” since these organizations have support infrastructure that is almost completely opaque, and the tier 1 people you reach are clueless about this. On one occasion, the “helpful” CS agent reset my password, sending me the new password they’d generated to me in email. In the clear.

At this point, the only action I can take, and which I highly recommend, is unsubscribing from all email feeds from one of these media companies.