Pixel dust.
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.
Internet Marketing is upstream of spycraft
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.
The spy pixel has been commonplace for more than a decade, perhaps 15 years.
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.”
Big surprise..No. Social media sites have are probably more into data mining than people realize selling that info to sites that customize advertising for a persons particular tastes.
If companies are using this for tracking, you know our gov’t is using something even more sophisticated.
Pixel dust.
“And several of the companies involved noted their use of such tech was mentioned within their wider privacy policies.”
Nobody reads that 4 page #7 font privacy policy. They just click the button and go on.
Its called “Steganography”
You easily can find the software to do this on-line.
They will waste a lot of time and money searching the streets of Singapore for me... Even with the pixels...
This was previously called a web bug, and has been used by many web sites for 20 years or so.
Usually it’s a 1 pixel weblink, that does what someone else already described. It sends a web page request, along with headers and all sorts of info concerning you, your computer and surfing habits.
Most websites would use one that was a very slight shade different from their background color, making it invisible for all practical purposes. Being only one pixel it was hard to see. An off white (eggshell, for instance) dot against a white background, one pixel in size, almost invisible and rarely noticed.
At that time, 1024x768 was the most common desktop size, so you’d be trying to see one of 1024 pixels in a horizontal line, or 768 vertically. My current laptop is 1366x768, not much different, and one pixel is not easy to see. Sometimes you could see it by trying to highlight the background. Sometimes slowly moving the mouse cursor over it would briefly show the mouse cursor change to indicate a weblink. That’s easy to see with a computer, not as easy with a phone or tablet.
As some have already advised, in this case, turning off the ability to view images will probably stop it from “phoning home”. That’s what web bugs were designed to do, send all kinds of info about you to the website owner’s home server. Only now they’ve turned it into a tiny picture.
I have my email client (Thunderbird) set to not display remote content unless I specifically request it.
This should be the default for all of them. It would make this kind of crap a lot less useful.
I would also point out that there are several ‘people’ on FR who do the same thing in their posts. They can identify the IP addresses of those who who read the post, and can probably correlate replies to IPs if you quote the cutsie graphic back at them.