i’m getting a lot of emails from my bank and other services that make me aware that they use tracking pixels in emails. apparently they are obliged by the privacy regulator that is enforcing a recent EU directive. i didn’t even know that i was sending ip and client info simply by reading my emails in thunderbird or k9 on my mobile. is there a way to deactivate these? and is there a risk that by doing so the bank thinks the email is compromised or non existant. its incredibile to see how sophisticated data hoovering technology has become. the internet has become a real mess …
Most email clients don’t fetch remote resources like images embedded in emails unless you specifically ask them to. If you’re seeing pictures in your emails without having to tap something extra after opening the email, you likely need to change your settings.
As someone else pointed out, FairEmail for android additionally blocks tracking pixels even if you want to load other images.
Loading other images or resources can still track you. For example, rather than using a tracking pixel, a company could create (let’s be honest, generate 🙄) a unique image for each email campaign they do, and make that a visually important part of the email, such as a title banner, and then track who loads that to see who opened the email. They could even add tracking metadata to the URL like
https://example.com/email-resources/october-newsletter-header.jpg?user=your-email%40your-domain.comimages attached to the email can also be embedded, which I think most clients will show by default. those don’t have privacy implications as they don’t need extra network requests.
Good point