Avoid the content
Email has been around for over 50 years. Back in 1971, what is commonly considered the first email was sent by Ray Tomlinson as a test of an email function on Arpanet. Since no one had informed him what the historic occasion was, he simply sent it to himself and the content was something like “QWERTYUIOP,” he stated in an interview in the late 1990s.
The process still used to send emails, SMTP, has been around since 1981. The most common protocol for retrieving and managing email, IMAP, was introduced in 1988. The biggest technical changes since then are the addition of encrypted connections using SSL/TLS.
At no time in the early years of email was privacy and defense of personal data included in the development of the email technology itself. Encryption for those who need to send keys came fairly early with PGP (1991) and S/MIME (1995), but 30 years later it has still not taken hold in the industry. Other developments have meant that email today has less privacy protection than ever.
Dangers to and from
Email can pose a privacy concern on two entirely different fronts, with entirely different requirements for protective measures. One is the tracking of your communication along the path between you and the recipient– that is, an external threat to your emails. A far greater concern for most people today is the threat that comes from within the email– numerous techniques to track and spy on you through the technical content of the emails you open.
Måns Jonasson at The Swedish Internet Foundation.
Internetstiftelsen/Kristina Alexanderson
How you are tracked
As soon as you open an email, the person who sent it can find where you are, when and how many times you open it. All this is thanks to so-called tracking pixels– small images, just a single white pixel, produced on the sender’s server with a random file name attached to you. This is used in everything from spam to newsletters and one-off emails.
Måns Jonasson, web professional at the Swedish Internet Foundation, explains that tracking through the scanning of images with unique file names attached to user profiles or accounts is not limited to tracking pixels.
It can be any image in an HTML email.
“HTML emails also allow you to track recipients using other methods such as cookies and dynamic content,” says Cooper Quintin, senior public interest technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
Both Måns Jonasson and Cooper Quintin also mention the other common way you are tracked: While tracking pixels and so on work passively, tracking links are an active form of tracking. There are generally two types of tracking links: links that do not go to the final destination at all, but reach it through a server that tracks the click and sends you on.
