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How Email Open Tracking Quietly Took Over the Web (wired.com)
Brian Merchant, writing for Wired: There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That's roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an "email intelligence" company that also builds anti-tracking tools. The tech is pretty simple. Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email -- usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts. When a recipient opens the email, the tracking client recognizes that pixel has been downloaded, as well as where and on what device. Newsletter services, marketers, and advertisers have used the technique for years, to collect data about their open rates; major tech companies like Facebook and Twitter followed suit in their ongoing quest to profile and predict our behavior online. But lately, a surprising -- and growing -- number of tracked emails are being sent not from corporations, but acquaintances. "We have been in touch with users that were tracked by their spouses, business partners, competitors," says Florian Seroussi, the founder of OMC. "It's the wild, wild west out there." According to OMC's data, a full 19 percent of all "conversational" email is now tracked. That's one in five of the emails you get from your friends. And you probably never noticed.
just uncheck this in your email reader. done.
then if you need to see the images they embed, click the "load remote content" button in the viewing window when you open it.
I actually got a surprise recently, an email from a vendor saying "you haven't engaged with any of our recent emails, here's a 10% off coupon for your next purchase". Well, we know what they mean by "engaged", don't we? :)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Stop using a web client to read e-mail, and it isn't a problem.
And if you're an admin, configure your SMTP servers to mark e-mail containing links to trackers as potential malware.
There are still mail clients that don't disable loading images by default?
And they get used?
Then I guess the people using them don't mind being tracked. Where's the story?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Email clients have been set to not load remote content by default for over 15 years. Gmail caches remote content to its own servers making tracking bugs in emails mostly useless unless you click an outbound link with tracking data in the URL. Unless you've changed the default setting from "DON'T load remote stuff by default" then you've not been trackable for a really long time. Who needs anti-tracking services? All I have to do is not click on any links. This is an old story. I wonder if the Wired article is "sponsored content;" they are, after all, one of the companies that has complained a lot about ad blockers, so I know they're pretty hard up for dollarydoos.
My email client is configured to not allow remote connections when I read an email. Some emails are not readable without allowing the tracking stuff, so I don't read them. It is as simple as that. So far, not one important email has been unreadable with remote access disabled.
I think the difference here is the rise of email tracking used by people you know. Companies have always tried to track us.
I read email with Mutt, no tracking. If it is HTML-only, it gets converted by Lynx, no includes, again no tracking. The whole problem would not exist without the insanity of misusing web-browsers to display emails.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?