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Apple Mail Now Blocks Email Tracking. Here’s What It Means for You
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Justin Pot

Security
May 7, 2022 7:00 AM


APPLE MAIL NOW BLOCKS EMAIL TRACKING. HERE’S WHAT IT MEANS FOR YOU

If you don’t like marketers (or anyone else) knowing when and where you read
your email, Apple’s feature will help you reclaim some privacy.
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Photograph: JOHN MACDOUGALL/Getty Images

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Nothing makes you more paranoid about privacy than working in a marketing
department. Trust me on this. For example, did you know that marketers track
every time you open an email newsletter—and where you were when you did it?

Apple caused a small panic among marketers in September 2021 by effectively
making this tracking impossible in the default Mail app on iPhone, iPad, and
Mac. I, personally, switched to Apple Mail as soon as the feature was announced.
You might feel the same way, but marketers feel as though they've lost a useful
tool.

"If I start a conversation with somebody and they're not responding to me, I'm
going to stop talking to them at some point," says Simon Poulton, vice president
of digital intelligence at marketing agency Wpromote. "But if someone is nodding
along, I'm going to keep talking."



Tracking email opens, to Poulton, is a way for marketers to see who is, and
isn't, listening—and adjust their strategy accordingly.

Privacy advocates feel differently. Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at
the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says tracking is bad for privacy, and he's
pleased that “Apple Mail now provides tools to take your privacy back.”



Let’s talk more about what, exactly, this feature does—and what it means for
you.

How Email Tracking Works (and How Apple Blocks It)

If you're really freaking old—36, say—you might recall some ’90s email clients
couldn't open certain emails with formatting. You'd instead be prompted to open
the email in your web browser. There's a reason for this.



Email dates back to the ’70s, when computers couldn't display much in the way of
graphics. Because of this, email protocols are more or less designed for simple
text messages with attachments—which works until you want to add things like
colors and images. By the ’90s, a workaround showed up: adding HTML code to an
email message that points to images hosted on servers.



I bring this history up only because it's what makes modern email tracking
possible. Most email newsletters you get include an invisible “image,” typically
a single white pixel, with a unique file name. The server keeps track of every
time this “image” is opened and by which IP address. This quirk of internet
history means that marketers can track exactly when you open an email and your
IP address, which can be used to roughly work out your location.

So, how does Apple Mail stop this? By caching. Apple Mail downloads all images
for all emails before you open them. Practically speaking, that means every
message downloaded to Apple Mail is marked “read,” regardless of whether you
open it. Apples also routes the download through two different proxies, meaning
your precise location also can't be tracked.

Apple’s Been Adding Features Like This for a While

So did this catch marketers off guard? Kind of.

“The Apple Mail thing specifically kind of came out of left field,” Poulton
tells me, “but the whole idea of the de-identification of users is something
we've been planning on for a while. This is a multipronged attack from Apple.”

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Poulton points to a few other Apple features, including iCloud's Hide My Email
and Intelligent Tracking Prevention in Safari and iOS, as other prongs in this
attack. These features make it harder, for example, for marketing departments to
use your shopping behavior on their website to show a targeted ad on Facebook.

“Apple's goal is to prevent any kind of digital identity stitching across
environments,” says Poulton, which is exactly what privacy advocates have been
pushing for—the ability for users and individuals to determine whether marketing
firms can connect their activities on one platform to their identities on
others. I should note, Poulton argues that consumers are worse off without this
tracking, which he says makes for more relevant ads.

“The internet has always been on a track toward personalization,” he says. “If
it can just predict my needs and desires before I get there, that's better. I
don't want to have to go out and make decisions. Sometimes I don't even know
what I'm searching for.”



Myself? I switched to Mac Mail entirely because of this feature, and not only
because I value my privacy. Less relevant ads mean I'm less likely to buy crap I
don't need, which means I have more money to save or donate to organizations
that need it. It also makes the world feel just a little less dystopian, which I
personally like. But that's possibly just a matter of preference.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Justin Pot is a freelance journalist who writes tutorials and essays that inform
and/or entertain. He loves beer, technology, nature, and people, not necessarily
in that order. 
Contributor
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Topicsemailprivacysoftwareapple




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