Nothing makes you more paranoid about privacy than working in a marketing department. Trust me on this. For example, did you know that marketers track every time you open an email newsletter—and where you were when you did?
Apple caused a small panic among merchants in September 2021 by effectively making this tracking impossible in the default Mail app on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I personally switched to Apple Mail as soon as the feature was announced. You may feel the same way, but marketers feel like they’ve lost a useful tool.
“If I start a conversation with someone and they don’t respond, at some point I’ll stop talking to them,” says Simon Poulton, vice president of digital intelligence at marketing agency Wpromote. “But if someone nods, I’ll keep talking.”
Tracking email opens, according to Poulton, is a way for marketers to see who’s listening and who isn’t — and adjust their strategy accordingly.
Privacy advocates feel differently. Bill Buddington, senior technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says tracking is bad for privacy, and he’s pleased that “Apple Mail now provides tools to restore your privacy.”
Let’s talk more about exactly what this feature does and what it means for you.
How email tracking works (and how Apple blocks it)
If you’re really old—36, say—you might remember that some email clients from the 1990s couldn’t open certain emails with formatting. Instead, you will be prompted to open the email in your web browser. There’s a reason for that.
Email dates back to the 1970s when computers couldn’t display many graphics. Because of this, email protocols are more or less designed for simple text messages with attachments – which works until you want to add things like colors and images. In the 1990s, a workaround emerged: adding HTML code to an email message that pointed to images hosted on servers.
I mention this story only because it makes possible the tracking of modern e-mail. Most email newsletters you receive include an invisible “image”, usually a single white pixel, with a unique file name. The server keeps track of every time this “image” is opened and from which IP address. This quirk of Internet history means that marketers can track exactly when you open an email and your IP address, which can be used to roughly determine your location.
