i’m getting a lot of emails from my bank and other services that make me aware that they use tracking pixels in emails. apparently they are obliged by the privacy regulator that is enforcing a recent EU directive. i didn’t even know that i was sending ip and client info simply by reading my emails in thunderbird or k9 on my mobile. is there a way to deactivate these? and is there a risk that by doing so the bank thinks the email is compromised or non existant. its incredibile to see how sophisticated data hoovering technology has become. the internet has become a real mess …
How does it work? Like a read receipt? I thought the likes of thunderbird were essentially offline after initial loading?
I assume it’s an img tag pointing at a one pixel image (every mail has its own querystring or URL), when you load it the server logs the time, requesting IP, and so on.
Obviously it’ll only work if you tell the mail client to download the images.
(It doesn’t need to be a single pixel, could be the bank’s logo or whatever, but since it has to be unique to ID you and avoid caching and whatnot I assume making it only one pixel is more efficient.)