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It should be of no surprise to any netizen that it is possible that your email is tracking or spying on you. This can be due to simply a marketing tool or, more extremely, a situation of malicious intent. We should all be aware of these situations and to take the responsibility for protecting ourselves! ======================================================= |
Ehi Kioya on August 14, 2014
Is That
Email Tracking Or Stalking You?
What
if each time you open an email, the sender can see where you are? What if they
know when exactly you open your email? While email tracking has been around
forever, a new Gmail extension actually makes the technology very easy for
anyone to use. Here’s what you can do to stay safe.
Email tracking / stalking
For
every email you get, the sender could track when and where you read it. A new
third-party extension for Gmail called Streak makes such tracking easily
available to anyone. Streak is available on the Google Chrome Store here.
While it’s primarily intended for email marketers who need to know if the
recipients of their marketing emails actually open them, it can be used by
anyone. Even more importantly, Streak is able to record the location of the
recipient for the sender.
Email tracking is hardly new
Email
tracking has actually been around for more than a decade. It has been
particularly popular with spammers, who use it to find out if an email address
is alive and if their emails have managed to get past various spam filters.
Streak, then, isn’t the game changer that many news reports have been calling
it. What it does, though, is to make this technology accessible to everyone. In
that way, it does make a difference.
What do you do if you don’t want to
be tracked?
Like
other email trackers, Streak works by default. If the sender of an email has
Streak, your email account won’t ask you for permission before phoning home.
Information about whether you’ve read your email is automatically passed to the
sender without your participation. Luckily, though, you have the power to make
a few simple changes and opt out.
Email tracking uses simple technology
Emails
aren’t able to actually run executable code. Whatever technique a particular
email tracking method needs to use, it has to be simple and passive. This makes
tracking relatively easy to disrupt. If you shut down your email account’s
ability to answer tracking requests, no one can track it.
When
a sender wants to track you, they have two choices — they can either include a
read receipt with the email or place an embedded beacon in it in the form of an
image. Read receipts are placed in email headers. When your email account sees
this header, it recognizes it as a request for tracking information and asks
you for permission to send such information to the sender. Since most people
wouldn’t ever give permission, this technique isn’t much of a threat.
An
embedded beacon image is slightly more serious. Embedded images aren’t attachments
— rather, they are links for images placed in the body of emails. These links
could be for images of the sender’s trademark at the top of the message or an
icon. When you open an email with such a link, your email account needs to go
where the link leads to get the image. Like any visit to a link, the server
supplying the data is able to determine the location in the world that the
request comes from and record the time that it is made. This is all the
information the sender needs — whether you have read your email, and if you
have, what time you did so and where.
The embedded image method is surprisingly simple to disable
All
email services come with the ability to disable automatic image loading. It is
usually turned off by default for messages in the spam folder. You can turn it
off for your inbox too. Once you do it, those embedded images don’t load and
the server doesn’t know when you open your email. How exactly to turn it off
depends on what email service you use.
On
Gmail, for instance, you go to Settings,
the General
tab and then the Images
category before you select the Ask
before displaying external images choice. Whatever email client
you use, you need to look up its help document for the procedure to follow.
You can rat yourself out, too
When
you use an email client like Microsoft Outlook rather than webmail, all emails
that you send out carry your IP address — it’s one great way to let the
receiver know where you are. On most webmail (barring Yahoo Mail), though, your
IP address isn’t shared. You’re safer.
===============================================For a great email parody, view the following link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTgYHHKs0Zw&__scoop_post=bcaa0440-2548-11e5-c1bd-90b11c3d2b20&__scoop_topic=2455618
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In addition to this blog, Netiquette IQ has a website with great assets which are being added to on a regular basis. I have authored the premiere book on Netiquette, “Netiquette IQ - A Comprehensive Guide to Improve, Enhance and Add Power to Your Email". My new book, “You’re Hired! Super Charge Your Email Skills in 60 Minutes. . . And Get That Job!” will be published soon follow by a trilogy of books on Netiquette for young people. You can view my profile, reviews of the book and content excerpts at:
www.amazon.com/author/paulbabicki
If you would like to listen to experts in all aspects of Netiquette and communication, try my radio show on BlogtalkRadio Additionally, I provide content for an online newsletter via paper.li. I have also established Netiquette discussion groups with Linkedin and Yahoo. I am also a member of the International Business Etiquette and Protocol Group and Minding Manners among others. Further, I regularly consult for the Gerson Lehrman Group, a worldwide network of subject matter experts and have been a contributor to numerous blogs and publications.
Lastly, I
am the founder and president of Tabula
Rosa Systems, a company that provides “best of breed” products for network,
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product information for virtually anyone.
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