Email Tracking. Yet Another Creep In The Crowd

The moment you opened that newsletter, that promotional email, that message from a brand you once purchased from — a signal went out. Not to you. Away from you. Back to the sender’s server, carrying information you never agreed to share and probably never knew you were sending.

This is email tracking. It is standard practice across the commercial email industry. It is largely invisible. And it tells the sender far more than most people realize.

Nearly every promotional email you receive contains at least one tracking element. Some contain several. They are embedded in the email before it is sent, activated the moment you open it, and designed to be completely undetectable during normal use. The technology is simple, the data it generates is surprisingly personal, and the fact that it exists is something most email recipients have never been told.

An email tracking pixel is a tiny image — literally one pixel by one pixel — embedded invisibly in the HTML of an email. It is too small to see. It carries no visible content. When you open the email, your email client automatically loads all images in the message, including this pixel. Loading the pixel sends a request to the sender’s server, and that request carries with it a package of information about you and your device.

The data transmitted in that single request typically includes your IP address and the approximate location it reveals, the exact date and time you opened the email down to the second, the type of device you used — phone, tablet, or desktop, the operating system and email client you are using, and how many times you have opened the email.

If you open the same email three times over two days — perhaps because you meant to act on it and kept coming back to it — the sender knows. They know you opened it on Tuesday morning at 8:47am on an iPhone in a particular city, again on Tuesday evening on a laptop, and once more on Wednesday. That pattern tells them something about your habits, your interest level, and your daily routine that you never consciously shared with them.

For commercial email senders — retailers, marketers, newsletters, service providers — tracking data is operationally useful and heavily analyzed. Open times inform when future emails are sent. Device information shapes how content is formatted. Open frequency is used to segment audiences and determine follow-up sequences.

If you open an email but do not click, you may receive a follow-up designed specifically for people who opened but did not convert. If you open multiple times, you may be flagged as a high-interest prospect and targeted more aggressively. If you never open, you may eventually be removed from the list — or subjected to a re-engagement campaign specifically designed to prompt a response.

The data does not stay only with the company that sent the email. Through advertising platforms and data broker relationships, email engagement data — combined with location data and device identifiers — can feed into broader consumer profiles used for targeted advertising across the web. The email you opened this morning may influence what advertisements you see this afternoon on entirely unrelated platforms.

The risks of email tracking are not purely commercial. In 2024, Kaiser Permanente — one of the largest healthcare providers in the United States — disclosed that tracking pixels embedded in its patient communications had leaked personal data including names and IP addresses of 13.4 million patients to third parties including Google and Microsoft.

The data exposed through these tracking elements included information that, in the context of healthcare, carries significant sensitivity — information that could reveal medical conditions, treatment histories, and health-related behaviour. Similar breaches affecting healthcare providers have been documented across the US and UK, including incidents involving NHS patient communications.

Tracking pixels do not discriminate between commercial email and sensitive correspondence. They operate the same way in a promotional newsletter as they do in a communication from a medical provider — silently, automatically, and without the recipient’s awareness.

Between 2023 and 2024, a wave of class action lawsuits in the United States targeted major brands — including Patagonia, Target, Gap, and Lowe’s — for using tracking pixels in marketing emails without adequate user consent. The lawsuits alleged that the pixels captured open times, locations, devices, and forwarding behavior without recipients knowing.

In June 2025, France’s data protection authority, the CNIL, published a draft recommendation that would require explicit user consent before tracking pixels could be embedded in commercial emails — treating them under the same consent framework as website cookies. The consultation closed in July 2025 and formal guidance is expected to follow.

The trajectory is clear: regulators are increasingly treating email tracking pixels as a form of data collection that requires consent. The practice that has been standard in commercial email for over a decade is coming under the same scrutiny as cookies — and may soon require the same explicit opt-in.

Blocking tracking pixels is one of the highest-impact privacy improvements available for the effort involved. Here is how to do it across the most common email platforms.

Apple Mail — enable Mail Privacy Protection. Go to Settings, Mail, Privacy Protection, and enable Protect Mail Activity. This routes all image loading through Apple’s own proxy servers, masking your IP address and device information. It does create a false open signal for the sender, but it prevents them from capturing any meaningful data about you personally.

Gmail — disable automatic image loading. In Gmail settings, go to General and find the Images section. Select Ask before displaying external images. This prevents tracking pixels from loading automatically — you choose when to load images in each email. For emails you trust, you can load images manually. For everything else, they remain blocked.

Outlook — block automatic downloads. In Outlook, go to File, Options, Trust Center, Trust Center Settings, Automatic Download, and check Don’t download pictures automatically in standard HTML email messages. This prevents all external images — including tracking pixels — from loading without your permission.

Consider a privacy-first email provider. Proton Mail blocks external images — including tracking pixels — by default. You must manually choose to load remote content for any email. This is the strongest protection available without any configuration required. Tuta takes the same approach. For anyone who takes email privacy seriously, switching to a provider with these defaults is worth considering.

Use a tracker-blocking browser extension. Extensions like uBlock Origin block tracking pixel domains at the network level, preventing the request from reaching the sender’s server even if images are enabled in your email client. This provides an additional layer of protection that operates independently of your email settings.

Email is not a passive medium. Every time you open a tracked message, you are transmitting. Blocking those transmissions is straightforward, takes minutes to set up, and costs nothing. The only thing it costs the sender is data they should not have been collecting in the first place.