Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, taking a break from criticizing the president who is not the president (it’s a Zen thing), has an excellent rant on the abomination that is email tracking pixels. As most Irreal readers surely know, tracking pixels are a one pixel, essentially invisible, image included for the purpose of tracking. When the image is downloaded the requesting IP address (at least) is captured and used to track that the recipient has read the email and, of course, how many times it was opened.
It’s another outrageous practice that the adtech industry tells itself is okay because “everybody does it.” Gruber takes a blowtorch to that and the other excuses that the industry offers. This disgraceful behavior has been going on for a long time. Gruber wrote about it a couple of years ago but it’s use predates that post by many years. According to the BBC, 2/3 of emails sent to personal accounts contain a tracking pixel.
What to do? Gruber mentions that the Hey Email client detects and eliminates essentially all the tracking pixels and laments that Apple, the company known for privacy, does nothing to prevent them. As regular readers know, we here at Irreal are not fans of calling in the government to fix every perceived problem but it’s hard to see how the industry’s behavior is any different from stalking, which we already have laws against. The use of tracking pixels is explicitly illegal in the EU but that law appears to be honored more often in its breach than in its observance. I like Hey’s strategy of displaying a “shaming banner” with any email that contained a tracking pixel. Perhaps if people saw how often it was happening they’d complain to the perpetrators.