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Tracking pixels are problematic, since loading them gives away information about browsing habits that... we don't want to give away. It's just an image though. There are lots of images, and they don't need to be 1x1 blank pixels. What about emoji? Are the images stored locally? Or do they (and reaction .gifs, etc) download from somewhere, based on some ID from a unicode character map? Is there some /path/to/emoji/data/ on my hard drive? How does that work, and are any of them potentially problematic like tracking pixels?
This might be a silly question, but I'm attempting to use a smoller web to find this out instead of other options. TIA for your thought and answers.
Nov 15 · 5 weeks ago
I've also wondered what metadata is given up by inserting (not uploading) an emoji or meme into say, signal.
🐝 undefined · Nov 16 at 07:08:
The standardized emoji are the same as any other text. The font they use is usually locally installed, but afaik it doesn't have to be. So they're not images. That being said, the tracking isn't really limited to images anyway, you could track with text too, or with scrolling or whatever have you.
🌲 Half_Elf_Monk [OP] · Nov 16 at 20:45:
Thanks for the replies. I'm wondering if I can locate the font files on my device to verify that the emoji are being pulled from a local source. Also I suppose it'd be good ot make sure that (on android) the keyboard is pulling those locally, rather than from a 3rd party cdn. (what data gets sent with the request? the whole sentence? the context? just the image needed? idk.) Anyways thanks again.
Emojis are basically Unicode characters, and the visual representation is done on the client's side, usually depending on what fonts you use. So it's not possible to track anyone using emojis like you would with tracking pixels.
The only way emojis are "useful" for tracking is that it's really really easy to do sentiment analysis of text that has emoji. I reckon that was one of the reasons that it was invented in the first place. It can be very useful for profiling individuals or even tracking their mood.
But no, you cannot track people with emojis the same way you track them with images, because the image resources are not loaded from the internet.