Ask HN: Please help me get in touch with Apple's email privacy engineers

I don't disagree with your overall point, but getting feedback like this in front of the eyes of an employee who can actually assess its validity is easier said than done.

https://mycompany.co/my-product-name?affiliate=12345678

That's obvious and easy to filter out, but let's say they changed it to:

https://myproduct.co/my-product-name/12345678

That's less obvious because it's part of the URL to resolve instead of a variable. You could filter out the "12345678" now to instead direct you to:

https://mycompany.co/my-product-name

OK, but let's say the company (through plausible deniability) didn't use permalinks, or (again through plausible deniability) used model numbers as their address. They could disguise the tracking link with

https://mycompany.co/12345678

Which could again be detected, but then you'd just get sent to

https://mycompany.co/

instead of the actual page you wanted to visit.

The point is, that if you try to filter out affiliate links, you will invariably get to a point where all you can do is send them to the homepage of the website in this cat-and-mouse game of disguising affiliate links as product pages. And while sending you to the homepage is theoretically completely private, I think marketing folks and actual end-users would understandably complain.

The problem here is that it will probably work on a small scale. But if someone like Apple or Google adjusted to it, places like MailChimp would notice immediately, and "fix the glitch" as you describe.