The famous secure email service provider ProtonMail has recently announced another step towards maintaining user privacy. As announced, ProtonMail now offers an email tracking protection system to protect users from snoopers.
ProtonMail Email Tracking Protection Feature
Sharing the details in a blog post, ProtonMail has announced the rollout of the new email tracking protection feature.
The service already offers end-to-end encryption for securing emails. But now, the new measures employ extra measures to prevent any sort of email tracking via advertisers or other entities.
Hence now, ProtonMail offers to block tracking pixels in emails (such as newsletters) to prevent the senders from spying on your activities and hiding the users’ IP addresses.
So, with these features, users can now subscribe to various newsletters without worrying about any tracking from the senders.
Regarding why this step was important, the service explained,
Over 40% of emails sent and received daily are tracked. It works by embedding a tiny, invisible spy pixel in an email sent to you, logging details about your mail activity.
As elaborated, the logged information from the senders may include the timestamps for opening the email, the number of times a user opened that email, the devices used for this purpose, and the IP address and location.
The services gathering such data may then not only use the details for their own advertising purposes but can also share with third parties without users’ consent.
The new feature is available by default with ProtonMail’s web app. So now, users don’t have to activate anything to enable this feature.
Nonetheless, existing users can easily check or modify this feature via Settings > Email Privacy > Block email tracking.
When enabled, users will be able to know the number of trackers the new features block when opening an email. A small icon would appear in the header section showing the number of trackers blocked.
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