How to stop your emails from being tracked
0Reported today on The Verge
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Reported today in The Verge.
How to stop your emails from being tracked
All of those obnoxious marketing emails that crowd your inbox aren't just pushing a product. They're also tracking whether you've opened the email, when you opened it, and where you were at the time by using software like Mailchimp to embed tracking software into the message.
How does it work? A single tracking pixel is embedded in the email, usually (but not always) hidden within an image or a link. When the email is opened, code within the pixel sends the info back to the company's server.
There have been some attempts to restrict the amount of information that can be transmitted this way. For example, since 2014, Google has served all images in Gmail through its own proxy servers, which could hide your location from at least some tracking applications. And extensions such as Ugly Email and PixelBlock have been developed to block trackers on Chrome and Firefox.
There is also a simple, basic step you can take to avoid trackers: stop your email from automatically loading images, since images are where the majority of these pixels hide. You won't be able to avoid all of the trackers that can hide in your email this way, but you will stop many of them.
Here's how to disable image autoloading in the major desktop and mobile email apps:
Click on the gear icon in the upper-right corner to access your settings, and then click on "See all settings."
In the "General" tab (the first one), scroll down to "Images."
Select "Ask before displaying external images."
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on "Save Changes."
Note that this will also turn off Gmail's dynamic email feature, which makes emails more interactive.
While the browser-based version of Outlook doesn't let you stop loading images,