Posted on 02/17/2021 9:08:39 AM PST by Red Badger
The use of "invisible" tracking tech in emails is now "endemic", according to a messaging service that analysed its traffic at the BBC's request.
Hey's review indicated that two-thirds of emails sent to its users' personal accounts contained a "spy pixel", even after excluding for spam.
Its makers said that many of the largest brands used email pixels, with the exception of the "big tech" firms.
Defenders of the trackers say they are a commonplace marketing tactic.
And several of the companies involved noted their use of such tech was mentioned within their wider privacy policies.
Emails pixels can be used to log:
if and when an email is opened how many times it is opened what device or devices are involved the user's rough physical location, deduced from their internet protocol (IP) address - in some cases making it possible to see the street the recipient is on This information can then be used to determine the impact of a specific email campaign, as well as to feed into more detailed customer profiles.
Hey's co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson says they amount to a "grotesque invasion of privacy".
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
Perilous Pixel Ping!..............
Don’t allow any reply on your email. people should not be able to see when you open emails. If they do its because you allowed it.
“Defenders of the trackers say they are a commonplace marketing tactic.”
That’s not a defense.
Please educate me on this. How do I find if it’s enabled?
That won't protect you from this tracking technique (search for "web bug"). Refusing to allow your email client to download any images will prevent it, but will also make a lot of your email unreadable.
Internet Marketing is upstream of spycraft
>>Refusing to allow your email client to download any images will prevent it, but will also make a lot of your email unreadable.
That’s a feature, not a bug. Going back to 8-bit ASCII text, no unicode, no (non-uuencoded or ascii) images not only reduces bandwidth requirements AND protects against all this tracking, but also is a measure of how O.G. the user is. Especially when displayed on a proper green screen.
>>Please educate me on this. How do I find if it’s enabled?
Depends on your email client - in my case I use outlook almost exclusively - anytime there is a tracking pixel, I get a yellow bar at the top of my email messages that says “’to protect your privacy, some pictures in this message were not downloaded”. If you see that message, and don’t click the ‘download pictures’ button, then the pixel won’t fire.
But if there are any images visible in the email you are reading, and you see those images, the tracking can work (and probably is being tracked).
It gets harder with ‘trusted senders’; once you ‘trust’ certain people, images can be made to download automatically - and the tracking does/can takes place.
Lots of scammy senders also make the emails almost useless if you don’t allow the pictures, so you often need to decide between not reading the emails at all (if they are useless without the pictures), or allowing the pictures and being tracked.
Some trackingpixels are not visible, even if you ‘download pictures’, in fact it is probably more common for them not to be visible than it is for them to be visible, but the reality is that any images that are in the email - visible or not - can track you, your ip address, your OS you are using, the email client and possibly browser (if you are using a browser based email)....its the world we live in
The default setting on my earthlink e mail account is “no download of images.”
If I want to see and emailed image, I click the download button. which is maybe twice a week.
https://www.maketecheasier.com/how-tracking-pixels-monitor-email/
Yup, either turn off external images or don’t allow html and do plain text emails. The latter is probably the safest and the email will be readable, unlike some html emails with images blocked.
These kinds of trackers can be helpful. If you have subscribed to a newsletter, for example, when you open that newsletter, the sender is notified that you are engaged ... and you’ll continue to receive it until you unsubscribe.
Turn off the auto-loading of images in your emails. When you open an image in email, the image isn't in the email per se, but it is HTML that reaches out to a server to retrieve the picture. When it does, it can pass along to the server the email address of the email making the request. By doing so, the spammers now know that they have a valid email address.
I do that!................
Day late, Dollar short, that's me!
The spy pixel has been commonplace for more than a decade, perhaps 15 years.
So it’s the link to the image in the email: when your browser fetches the image, the ip of the request is tracked and location deduced?
Nothing new. This isn’t a spy pixel. When you click on the link, or if your email client opens the picture link, the sender’s server receives the request which contains your IP address and other information.
I set my email client to “do not open pictures for unknown senders.”
Hehehehehe...a ‘proper green screen’...:)
I don’t get it. How does an image manage to get that information. What is the mechanism?
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