Mail Privacy Protection
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.
One of the new privacy features included in iCloud+ is what Apple calls Mail Privacy Protection. While that’s designed to protect Apple Mail users from overly intrusive marketeers, some are worried that it could badly hurt small publishers of email newsletters.
That’s because it will deny them access to a key metric used to sell the advertising that makes many such newsletters viable…
And so it’s no surprise that some observers look at Mail Privacy Protection and see a threat. “This is another sign that Apple’s war against targeted advertising isn’t just about screwing Facebook,” Joshua Benton wrote in Nieman Lab. “They’re also coming for your Substack.”
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But after conversations with newsletter writers and media executives today, I’m not sure that people doing email-based journalism have all that much to worry about from the shift.
Email open rates are notoriously unreliable. Some sources will say that open rates are underreported; others will say that they are way too high. That is because open rates are determined by the number of times that a tracking pixel in an email is downloaded. If users have images turned off, it will not be triggered; if a user’s email client automatically goes to the next message when an email is deleted, it may register as the email being opened again and again.
It sounds like like MPP proxies will pre-download images regardless of whether you open the email. The effective open rate will look like 100% for Mail users. Since the download is out of band from the viewing, the access time is also meaningless.
Apple.
Also Apple.
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