No idea how we submit a recommendation? My HubSpot AI assistant told me this is the best way to raise issues with HubSpot dev team - but I cannot see any response from them on here.
I would not fully agree that region-based email tracking controls are the best solution for this problem.
We are a German company, and our clients are mainly located across DACH and Europe. Similar regulations are expected to come into effect in other European countries beyond France. Therefore, we would prefer a more flexible solution that can be maintained at contact level, allowing us to store whether a specific contact has consented to tracking or not. Based on this preference, HubSpot should not implement a tracking pixel for contacts who have opted out of tracking.
This would help us avoid switching off tracking completely for specific regions or cases and instead manage tracking preferences more precisely.
Additionally, as open rate is already a less reliable KPI, we would appreciate the option to turn off only open tracking for affected marketing emails or contacts, while keeping click tracking enabled where legally possible.
It looks as though some great progress has been made. In case you’re not following this thread- Per-Contact Control for Email Open & Click Tracking (EU Data Privacy Compliance)
This is absolutely needed – tracking on/off at contact level.
Our Hubspot rep gave us access to a beta option to turn off tracking at email level. But using this workaround means we have to create exclusion audiences and send two versions of every message. Very cumbersome.
+1 Need it !
Couldn’t agree more and I do not understand how Hubspot did not just create this immediately letting us deal with this in backwards ways.
+1 - we need to complete the GDPR module quickly to be compliant
Hi everyone - My name is Jackie Brenna, and I am a Product Manager on HubSpot’s Email Platform team. First, I want to thank you all for taking the time to share your feedback. It directly influences how we prioritize our work!
I’m happy to share that we are actively building a consent-based tracking solution. The plan is a new “track by consent” option that introduces a new email address consent record that will govern whether a tracking pixel is inserted at send time - no manual action required on a per-campaign basis. The property will store the metadata required for compliance (timestamp, consent source, method of collection) and will be the source of truth the backend evaluates at the moment of send.
We’re still in the scoping phase, so I can’t commit to a delivery timeline yet, but this is a top priority and we’re moving on it. In the meantime, keep the feedback coming - I’ll be monitoring this thread closely and will post updates as possible. Thanks!
Hi @JBrenna!
It’s great that this is being prioritised and actively in development! 
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As a quick follow up on scope, as you’re mentioning a ‘track by consent’ option, just double checking, does this mean that you’re building a consent mechanism to allow people to opt-in/opt-out similar to the marketing subscriptions?
Just making sure it’ll be as easy to use and manage as marketing communication consent, and that will be able to add that to forms, etc.
Agree with what is being discussed here. We need a contact level opt-out for email open/click tracking.
However – this also needs to work for transactional email. We send a high volume of transactional emails and have no way to disable tracking for transactional email. Either when sent as part of a workflow or triggered via the API.
Our current ‘marketing email’ tracking system applies to all emails that send out of our ‘marketing email’ tool (which includes automated emails, emails using the ‘transactional’ subscription type, and emails sent via single send api). This scope will also apply to the new consent based tracking system we are developing now. Hope this helps to clarify the scope!
Right now we’re focused on the consent record itself and updating the sending pipelines so that record governs whether the tracking pixel is added. Longer term, we’re exploring native solutions to enable customers to gather consent - but we’re prioritizing the pipeline changes first. Hope this helps!
+1 It’s hard to imagine that such a high-performing global platform hasn’t yet rolled out a solution to handle pixel unsubscribes via direct contact, without having to duplicate emails.
+1 we also need this asap
We have trained our users to work within the Hubspot portal but there seems to be no option to manually select if an email shall be tracked as e.g. in Outlook or other email clients that are using the Hubspot extension.
It is very important that such a feature is not developed with a pure “MarketingHub” perspective only, but also with SalesHub (1:1 or sequences) perspective.
The feature we are scoping will enforce tracking consent for both marketing and sales/1:1 emails.
Thank you @JBrenna for confirming that SalesHub will benefit, too.
I´d rather turn off tracking for SalesHub 1:1 and Sequences than to have our sales team begging for yet another consent.
The easiest implementation would be that per default contacts from France and Italy do not get tracked, i.e. the sales team members would not even have the ability to track emails to contacts in FR+IT.
If we leave it on the shoulders of the individuals (Sales, Service etc.), we may not have consistent results and emails that slip through with tracking turned on.
+1, we need it as well. As currently always need to duplicate the work and turn off the tracking is not practical.
Duplicate work is one problem.
But having sales reps that need to switch from the Hubspot portal to Outlook in order to disable tracking when they send messages to France or Italy and then switch back to the portal for the rest of contacts is really a nightmare.
Also very errorprone and just a matter of time until they make mistakes and send tracked email to a French or Italian contact.
It´s very ugly at the moment because I´d want them to continue to work as much within the portal as possible from an adoption perspective. If they get used to live again in their mailbox, it will be another adoption effort to get them back into the portal.
The faster Hubspot offers
a) a central solution (preferred) or
b) a checkbox to deactivate tracking within the portal,
the better.
Thank you so much for sharing this feedback. The solution we are building will work for both marketing and sales/1:1 emails!