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Apple Putting a Stop to Email Tracking Pixels With Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15 and macOS Monterey
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Well, Best Buy and Target’s emails don’t load if I block remote images. I am sure many retailers do something similar. You might call that spam, but I suspect most people would disagree.
I like Apple about this security, privacy security is essential for users, no one is allowed to track them unless they give permission
I think this sort of tracking was stopped years ago, first by gmail if I remember correctly. Gmail serves would recognize that the logo.png doesn't change and cache it for all subsequent gmail users.
It would be nice if Apple provided proper spam filtering. So you never get the spam but once or twice a day you get a spam report and can release/whitelist any emails that were incorrectly identified as spam.
Number of opens isn't a good marketing metric any way. If your content is good people will click on the links in your email, and then you have your metrics on the other end.
You want to leave Mail.app because Outlook.app doesn‘t have comparable privacy features?This is only for Apple's in-house Mail app right? If so I suppose I'll switch back to it from Outlook. Outlook is so good though.
This feature will download the tracking image independent of how and when you interacted with it. Even if you never open the email the picture is downloaded.
So it will look like you opened every email and you did it almost immediately which would be false for a lot of cases, thus reducing the value of such tracking.
Do the phrases "hidden" and "tracking" not bother you? I don't feel life is bettered by ad stalkers sucking our details for no reason other than greed. Too bad Nielsen, go back to letting people submit voluntary diaries. Too bad FB, stop feeding "customized" fake news. Why is it ok to allow businesses to do this and try to prevent governments from prying into our internal and private lives.
No one is bashing that I see. This some of the more tamed debated I have seen that no one thinks this is "bad" (not enough, maybe). More like trying to interpret the vague language Apple uses (typical Apple marketing) and trying to figure out exactly what this does or does not do to make an informed decision to use this or remote image disable.
This is still part of my issue too. If you operate under the assumption that enough people actually use this, as it appears opt-in at least in beta, then sure it will help. How much who knows.
Apple mail is only about 50% of opens; so you are only talking 50% MAX if every user Apple users upgraes to the newest OS version and enables it. Which iOS14 is still not on 10% of devices released in the last 4 years, and then you have those older devices which can't upgrade. I dont know about Mac ad Pad.
So you are already down to 80-90% of possible iPhones alone to start. As mentioned it would have been better to separate the core apps and update the mail app through the App store to give it to all users regardless of iOS version. But alas...
If you dont have enough false positives (yet), they will just read it as opens until then. This strategy purely revolves round the advertiser getting a flurry of instant opens; enough to make to useless data. And that is at least months away still past public release and everyone using it.
Further, there is really nothing from unscrupulous spammers like that to just keep blasting you if you open; whether the opens are noise or not. It really "costs" them nothing as t is done in batch lists. They can't tell if it is a human or Apple open so they lose nothing to keep tryng.
I still personally believe the remote images disabling will give a better end effect. Most are not going to spend resources blasting people who never open their stuff; or auto-remove them from lists after one or a few tries and no open. That is not useful to them. Of course the above apples, they can still spam you, but most won't bother if you arent opening. You are useless to them.
But this is all a guess, honestly. It's been out a few days total. And right now there won't be enough people using this for 6-8 months (it wont even be out to the public in mass for 3) to get it on enough devices to cause a meaningful impact on the metrics.
For now Im just using the hide IP and disable remote images toggles on combined.
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They explain what the feature does:
"In the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. The new feature helps users prevent senders from knowing when they open an email, and masks their IP address so it can’t be linked to other online activity or used to determine their location"
It basically does two things which are clearly spelled out.
They don't compare it to not loading pictures at all because very few regular users want to that.
I get that but refer to my latest post; not many ago.
Think bout it like camo in the military. This is like taking 100 soldiers and putting them in camo to disguise them from the surroundings. That is what this is trying to do, disguise your open from the spammer by auto-opening all of them for everyone. The spammer doesnt know what is human opened or not.
But that whole concept is contingent upon everyone using this option. If you have 100 guys out there and 50 are in orange hunting vests, well that doesnt exactly cause the enemy to move on.
That is the whole issue here; the concept assumes everyone will use it to cause all of those instant opens to be a meaningful volume and percent of the data making it irrelevant. And we don't know that yet.
No one is saying it is a bad start but articles like this saying it is defeating pixel tracking, not really. And adoption of this is unknown, considering how many people may not upgrade or older devices (or check mail on the web or other PC/devices), which it hinges upon the way it is set up. The IP stuff is good though.
And this isnt about what regular users want. Apple has decided that for them and no comments here will change what is already released. Easiest for all as Apple sets it does not always mean best overall.
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I read it the same way - they're effectively spoiling the data not by refusing to load the images, but by ensuring that every image is loaded, so the marketing folk can no longer trust the results they get back. This is a very interesting move on Apple's part, and not one I would have predicted. I'm not sure what there is in the way of an effective counter to this.
I think it is way too early to say this won't work like it should etc. It is going to take some time before we start to see how effective (or not) it really is.
It's called sarcasm. When Apple introduced App Tracking Transparency -- these were criticisms from Facebook and Facebook defenders. Because Facebook needs defending and Apple asking if an App can have permission to track you outside of the App and across the web is so unfair.
Once again the media spins something into more than it actually is.
Ive been coding emails for 15 years and there’s ALWAYS been a tracking pixel in your email. NONE of the email service providers that I’ve used reveal your IP Address, but your opens and clicks are extremely important to the marketing team.
You like those personalized emails you get with rewards and targeted messaging? We can’t do that if we don’t know your preferences. How do we know if the email is a “winner” with our customers if we can’t see what you’ve clicked on?
There’s two sides to every story and this article only shows one. Funny how Apple knows where we’ve been and what we do on their phones but are willing to block other’s marketing efforts.
Ive been coding emails for 15 years and there’s ALWAYS been a tracking pixel in your email. NONE of the email service providers that I’ve used reveal your IP Address, but your opens and clicks are extremely important to the marketing team.
You like those personalized emails you get with rewards and targeted messaging? We can’t do that if we don’t know your preferences. How do we know if the email is a “winner” with our customers if we can’t see what you’ve clicked on?
There’s two sides to every story and this article only shows one. Funny how Apple knows where we’ve been and what we do on their phones but are willing to block other’s marketing efforts.
If I wanted you to know what my preferences are I‘d tell you.
If the personalized email had such a great offer that one would be out of their mind to ignore it, I’d say yeah, track me all you want. Since not, than to heck with you.
For someone who has "coded emails" for 15 years you seem to know surprisingly little about how it works.
And my privacy is important to me. It's none of the "marketing team's" business if and when I read my emails.
If someone clicks on a link you see that anyway. That's more than enough.