Brian X Chen, writing for the New York Times:
It didn’t take much for Florian Seroussi, a technology investor in Manhattan, to become suspicious of his email.
His misgivings were sparked late one night last year when he opened a message from an entrepreneur who was asking him to invest in a start-up. Minutes later, Mr. Seroussi’s cellphone rang with a call from the same start-up executive.
Coincidence? Not to Mr. Seroussi. “What are the odds that at 10:30 at night, a guy suddenly has a vision that I’m reading his email?” he said. “They must know something that I don’t.”
It turned out that the start-up executive had planted a tracking mechanism into his message to Mr. Seroussi, a trend that is increasingly afflicting all of our email. Trackers, which come in many forms including a single invisible pixel inserted into an email or the hyperlinks embedded inside a message, are frequently being used to detect when someone opens a message and even where that person is when the email is opened. By some estimates, trackers are now used in as much as 60 percent of all sent emails.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
And the 7 trackers on The Loop website are for??
This has been going on forever. Many of my employers throughout theyears required me to use this technique.
Only 5 today 🙂
Dave, there is an easy (comprehensive?) fix to this:
Settings>Mail>Load Remote Images =off.
Would be good to add this as an update to your article.
This is why well-behaved email readers don’t load images or URLs without asking your permission.
You click on a link, well, that’s what clicking a link does – it talks to the internet and tells someone you clicked that link.
Many seem to have – for this sort of reason – at least image loading turned off by default.
I think many people turn that “feature off” since the email looks “broken” when its not loading the graphics … this issue has been around for at least 10 years – if not more.
Isn’t that what Read Receipts are? They’ve been around nearly as long as email has existed. Am I missing something more scandalous than that with this article?