Everyone sends emails now: political parties, your book club, freelance journalists, the social networks you're signed up to, your parents, that online store that you only bought one item from a decade ago, and many, many more.

What do a lot of those email senders have in common? They want to know whether the messages they send you are being opened, and there are a variety of tools available to help them do just that—tools that aren't all that hard to use.

A tracking pixel, embedded somewhere in the email, is how most people monitor whether an email gets opened. Once the tiny, hidden single-pixel image is loaded, it reports back to base. Their use across emails is now up to "endemic" levels according to some experts.

Tracking pixels can report the times and dates their associated email was opened, as well as the location of the device used, and the email client involved. That's a lot of data to feed back to a third-party that you might not know much about.

So the best way is to start by turning off automatic loading of external images, or to try using extensions which help detect and block this behaviour for you.

See https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-tell-which-emails-track-you/

#technology #privacy #email #tracking #trackingpixels