Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to talk a little bit of basic privacy: tracking pixels!

Nefarious Tracking Pixels

There is something that I've known about for a year or two now, but every now and then I forget for a little bit until I'm reminded how sneaky companies can be! There is a very hidden and nefarious practice that companies use to see what emails people are actually clicking on. Most people would think "a company besides my email provider could never know I opened an email" right? Well sadly, for the most part that's not accurate! Let's delve into why..

Privacy has been something I've been getting more involved in, in my personal and work life. We are entering an age where privacy is being hacked away, literally and figuratively, every day and we need to fight back. There are so many things that we can do, small and simple things, for us to fight back against this insidious agenda and trend. Email is one of the easiest ways for us to make improvements in this space!

We all are in our email inboxes at least once a day for various reasons. If we are expecting a package, we check our email or if we just log into it to see what has come through and what we can delete. One of the things that I didn't realize though is that companies can find out what emails you are opening and it's pretty sneaky how they are doing it! One of the things that surprised me a bit was how the email companies are disabling this by default which is interesting!

Perusing the internet for something to talk a bit about what I'm writing here, I came across this article for folks to reference and make sure that I'm not just blowing shit around. What this is, is called tracking pixels. What the companies that are sending you emails will do is insert at least a 1x1 pixel image into their email somewhere. Most email providers disable email image loading by default, I think this is likely to save on bandwidth to be honest, most of them are not interested in protecting our privacy. I'm sure you are well aware of the banner that pops up at the top of your email "display images" in the email. There is also the option to "always display images from this sender" or something along those lines. This means that the email companies are protecting you, albeit in a different way than they are intending to.

The companies that are sending the emails, often solicitations or something, they need to know who is clicking on their emails and who is not, or at least not sharing the information with the company. They do this by sending data back to their servers when an email is loaded, it will iterate through the various lines in the email and there could be a tracking pixel in the regular body of the email or, most often, they are hidden and embedded in the images in the email. The information they gather does help them with marketing campaigns but we all know that most of these things are bullshit anyways, and are just looking to harvest our precious data and sell more crap.

I've been reminded of this stuff because I've started switching my email provider from the Gulag provider, over to a more privacy focused one and the difference is quite noticeable. The new provider has these privacy things on by default and they are a lot more informative and helpful on what they are blocking by default and how I can enable things one time or enable things per email sender. These are small things but they make a world of difference when it comes to our privacy and security.

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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