If you’re sitting at a place using Wi-Fi, people will know somebody at this email address has clicked this link,” Li said. “That means any activity that’s being tracked, like link clicks, are all being exposed to whatever network you’re on. Among the top 10 most popular email tracking services, Oracle runs four of them (,, , ), Adobe runs and Google runs .”Īccording to Sydney Li, a writer, and researcher for the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has written extensively about the privacy concerns that email tracking poses, invasive email tracking happens regularly over unencrypted connections. “We also found that it is those big companies,” said Xu, “such as Oracle, Adobe, and Google, that provide those top ETSes.
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“Such businesses include, but are not limited to, education, travel, financial, health, shopping, and software vendors.” The study also showed that about 58 percent of emails from travel businesses and 43 percent of emails from health businesses track emails United Airlines and Staples specifically have used “at least eight or nine” different email-tracking services to access user data for customized marketing. “Various businesses have a high demand for email tracking services,” said Xu, who conducted with University of California San Diego postdoctoral researcher Shuai Hao a 2018 study titled Privacy Risk Assessment on Email Tracking.
And many of these third-party businesses are paying big money for our information. In a revealing 2017 paper, three Princeton computer scientists found that “when users click links in emails, regardless of the email client, we find additional leaks of the email address to trackers.” The insidious nature of mailing list emails means that users who click on links or pictures in emails are at risk of having their information shared with multiple third parties without their consent. And what’s worse is that 30 percent of mailing list emails also leak a user’s email address to third-party trackers in order to create targeted ads to potential consumers. With mailing list emails, newsletters and other marketing-based emails, tracking resources are used a staggering 70 percent of the time. This prevalent, secretive way of collecting customer data, which can infer a recipients geolocation, the device they’re using, and even the sleeping patterns of users, happens constantly. The obvious implication of email tracking services is their gross breach of privacy - recipients are often unaware that they’re being tracked.
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Haitao Xu, an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences at Arizona State University focusing on the intersection of cybersecurity and user privacy, “is that every time a recipient opens an email, their browser will automatically download the invisible image pixel from the email tracker's server.” During this process, says Xu, the tracker’s server collects information about the recipient, allowing it to notify its client (or the email sender) when, how many times, where, and from what device a recipient opened the email.
But most importantly, email tracking is evolving into a fairly ubiquitous technology that’s invading our personal privacy and affecting not only marketing emails, but our personal emails, too.įor those unfamiliar with email tracking, it is a technology first introduced in the early ‘90s that places an invisible image pixel into a sender’s email notifying them when an email has been opened or clicked. My experience made me realize that extensions like Streak can promote paranoia, frustration, and it can cause unnecessary amounts of stress.
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