Oh, you didn’t know it was possible for email senders to know all this about you just because you clicked open? It’s too much, and it happens a lot — especially in newsletters and email marketing. But trackers are not limited to them. Anyone can secretly insert a tracker into your email. services that do this are plentiful and free. If you’re the kind of person who turns off read receipts on texts and DMs, this is probably not good news to read. While it’s creepy to think about your email reading habits being tracked, that’s not the only reason you should consider taking a few extra steps to protect your email. Your email address has become one of your best and most persistent identifiers, and data brokers and marketers will match what you do with it in one place to what you’ve used it for in others. This helps them build an increasingly comprehensive profile of your online (and offline) life. You may be fine with receiving emails from the store you gave your address to, or even with that store knowing if you opened their emails. You may not be doing so well with many other companies that you have nothing to do with knowing this as well. But that’s exactly what happens. There is also the safety factor. Emails are leaked all the time in data breaches, and there’s a lot a determined hacker can do with your email address, especially since email addresses often double as login credentials. If a company doesn’t have your real email address, that’s one less thing to worry about getting out there if (or, really, when) that company gets hacked. The good news is that there are ways to better protect your email privacy. News just broke: DuckDuckGo, the first privacy search engine company, has just opened its Email Protection service after a year of beta testing. Apple, Firefox and Proton have similar offerings, each with their own pros and cons. Here are some services and ways to make your email more private and why you should consider using them. These aren’t the only companies that offer these services, but each has a reputation for protecting their users’ privacy. In some cases, this is their mission statement.
Hide your email address
One of the best ways to protect your email privacy is also one of the most obvious: Don’t give out your email address in the first place. But email addresses are valuable, so companies will do whatever they can to get them. Maybe they’ll ask you to give them your email address if you want to order anything, or put a nice juicy discount in front of you in return. One solution is to use a service that gives you an alias email address, which redirects messages to the inbox of your choice. This way, you can receive all emails (and coupons) in your real inbox without the senders knowing what your real address is. Perhaps the best-known example of this is Apple’s “Hide My Email” feature. I use it, so I can tell you that it works as promised. I get unlimited nicknames and use a different one everywhere. But, as seems to be the case with all things Apple, it works much better within the Apple ecosystem than outside of it. If you’re signed in to your iCloud account using an Apple device, go through Apple’s Safari browser, or use Sign in with Apple, then Hide My Email will appear as an option in your emails. Creating and entering your fake email address is as easy as entering your real one. But if you’re using a non-Apple product or service, the process becomes much more time-consuming and inconvenient. Another disadvantage is that it costs. You must have an iCloud+ account, which starts at 99 cents a month and includes other things like extended cloud storage. So, while Hide My Email is a good feature for some, it’s probably not the best option for everyone. DuckDuckGo Email Protection makes it easy to create fake email addresses. DuckDuckGo Email Protection, on the other hand, is free. And it’s available in most web browsers if you install the DuckDuckGo extension, which you can get through the DuckDuckGo website or your browser’s extension store (the notable exception being Safari, though DuckDuckGo says it’s in the works ). After that, it will automatically pop up as an option whenever there is an email, similar to Hide My Mail. You get as many aliases as you want, setup is simple, and it has a few other features that I’ll get into later. There’s also Firefox Relay, which has a free and paid option. The free one only gives you 5 aliases, while the paid tier has unlimited addresses. It’s 99 cents a month, though Firefox says that price will only be available for a limited time. Also, the browser extension you’ll need to easily use Relay in email isn’t available in all browsers. Finally, you must have or create a Firefox account to use it. This is easy enough to do, but it’s also an extra step you might not want to take when signing up for a service that’s supposed to help you avoid giving away your data when creating accounts. Finally, Proton – which is best known for its encrypted email service – now offers the ability to create fake email addresses with paid Proton Mail plans, which start at $3.99 per month. However, the cheapest option only gives you 10 aliases, so if you plan to use a different email for everything, this won’t be enough. If you don’t want to deal with going through an alias service, you can always just create your own alternate account with whatever email provider you use and put that down for all the things you don’t want to give your real email address for. It will reduce the amount of spam email you get in your real inbox, but if you use that one email address enough times in enough places, it will become the same identifier for you as your real email address.
Block these trackers
Whether you give your real email address or use a pseudonym, you may not want email senders to know if and when you read their messages. They can learn a lot about you just from that. This tracking is done through tiny little images – basically one pixel – embedded in the email. When you open the email, it makes a call to the server hosting the image, which tells the tracking service that you opened the email, how many times you opened it, when you opened it, some information about the device you used to open it, and possibly more and your IP address (many email providers have this cut out. Gmail, for example, routes image requests through their servers, which hide your IP address). Some of the same companies that offer email aliases also have tracking blocking services. Apple released its tracker blocking feature, Mail Privacy Protection, last year with iOS15. The good news is that Mail Privacy Protection is free and easy to turn on — whether you got a message the first time you opened Mail asking if you wanted to turn it on, or it’s a matter of finding it in your settings. The bad news is that it only works in Apple’s Mail app. Proton mail service enables tracker protection by default and is available in both free and paid tiers. It will tell you which trackers it has blocked and who they are from, giving you the opportunity to somehow spy on the companies that are spying on you. But the tracking protection is only available on the Proton website. Proton says it’s coming to the mobile app soon. DuckDuckGo’s email protection service is not tied to any company or operating system. It detects and filters trackers before they reach your (real) inbox. It also removes trackers from links to emails and will let you know if an email contained trackers and who they came from. Just to give you a sense of how pervasive these trackers are: DuckDuckGo says that about 85 percent of emails that went through its new service during the Email Protection beta phase contained trackers. The free and premium tiers of Firefox Relay also remove trackers. Note that both the DuckDuckGo and Firefox options only remove trackers from emails that go through them. that is, the emails that come through the email aliases you created with their services. They do not remove trackers from emails that go directly to your real email address. Finally, you can always go the DIY route by going to your email settings and making sure you choose not to download images automatically. In Gmail, for example, you can do this by going to Settings > General > Images > Ask before showing external images. The downside to this method is that your emails can look like a sea of broken image icons, as you’re not just blocking trackers, you’re blocking all externally hosted images, even if they’re perfectly harmless. One final note: While these services and techniques will certainly protect your privacy to some extent, nothing is foolproof. If there is any identifying information associated with your alias email address — maybe you create an account using it and then order something to be delivered to your real address using your real name — it won’t be difficult for a data broker to match it back to you. Although tracking blockers are effective, there is always the possibility that marketers and the tracking services they use will find another way to track you through your emails. And then we’ll start the whole process of figuring out how to block those trackers again.
