Hello mgaudette,

I appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback about the invoice status tracker. We're always interested to learn how customers such as yourself like the various features in QuickBooks Desktop and knowing your concerns is also invaluable. I'll be sure to pass those on to my team.

The invoice status tracker is intended to show you what's happening with the sent transaction so you don't have to worry about or check in with your customer to see if they've gotten it. The goal is to keep things simple and free up your time so you can focus on other business needs. At this time, there isn't a way to turn it off. You can learn more about the feature in the following community article: Verify that an invoice was emailed and read by recipient

Don't be afraid to stop by again if you have more questions. I'm happy to do what I can to help and answer your questions. :)

Thank you - it answers my question, but it's also very surprising to me that a tracker linking back to  a web service not under the control of the Quickbook user (i.e. me) is forced upon said user.

Please convey the privacy/confidentiality issue to your team - this feature should definitely be optional, more than any other feature I can think of in your product.  I can't imagine that no one on your team brought this up at the design stage.