Posted: February 4, 2024

How your e-mail spies on you

In the Swiss cheese realm of electronic devices, plugging holes is like the work of Sisyphus; worst of all, you can’t even see where the damn holes are.

This past Friday, I received a letter from a commercial company (whose name we do not speak of) that, for some inexplicable reason, I decided to read in its entirety, privacy policy and all.

Now, while we are still on the topic of Sisyphus, this just begs the question: Why in the name of Tartarus would I do that? (clutching my fists and looking to the heavens…) Well, I just said… it’s inexplicable, I sometimes do read things nobody else does…

But the thing is that, right there, in the privacy policy section of the letter, this particular company very casually discloses that they use e-mail tracking in the form of pixels. Unlike mine, here, the wording they use in their letter is easy to dismiss, if you are not paying attention… But what they are telling you—to your face!—is that they are spying on you, and the spying can go on for as long as you don’t become aware, until you delete the e-mail message.

But I did not become alarmed by this, right there and then, I actually read the entire 5 pages, even more carefully, a second time. Then I started looking into what this all means for us, the end consumers, who are bottled up, packaged, and peddled over and over again.

I am not an expert on these matters, my objective is only to make you aware that these things happen; its up to you to safeguard your privacy, if that is of any concern to you. This is what I know:

For “marketing purposes”, some (probably most) companies will send you e-mails that contain images that are only 1 pixel tall by 1 pixel wide. Their tiny size makes them pretty much invisible, but these images have to be loaded from outside servers and, in the process, they can reveal to the sender lots of information about you, such as, but not necessarily limited to:

  • Whether you opened their e-mail

  • The number of times you have viewed the e-mail

  • Whether you scrolled their e-mail and how far down their e-mail you scrolled

  • How long you had their e-mail open for

  • Whether you clicked on any of their links

  • Whether you forwarded their e-mail to others

  • The time and date when you opened their e-mail

  • Your IP address

  • Your location

  • Which e-mail app you are using

  • The type of device you are using

  • The spying may not stop until you delete the e-mail message.

As I said, I am not an expert on these matters, and this is not, by any means, an exhaustive list. There are ways to protect your privacy, but none that are easily implemented without breaking functionalities. Loading and reading your e-mails in plain text, rather than HTML, might be a solution, but what will you be sacrificing in so doing?

At a minimum, if you are using apple products, tick the box per the example below, in the e-mail app settings: