Or, he said, you could simply turn off your Wi-Fi while opening and reading email messages. “A more advanced technique is to construct a personal firewall that blocks images,” said Gerald Friedland, director of audio and multimedia research at the International Computer Science Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. You can click on the missing images you want to see and which ones you don’t. Disabling images will sift and block images from incoming emails, including those tiny, pixel-size tracking bugs. It used to be set that way by default but last year, in a boon to marketers, Gmail made the setting an opt-out feature and many other email providers followed suit. Perhaps the easiest defense is to adjust the settings of your email program so there is no image rendering. There are some things you can do to avoid having your email activity monitored. “What it does is lure you into an online environment and the collection that goes on there without alerting you that it’s happening,” said Ryan Calo, a professor of law at the University of Washington Law School in Seattle who specializes in privacy issues. When the email or document is opened, the bug triggers your device to contact the sender’s server and convey all sorts of information. These bugs are 1-by-1 pixel images (tinier than tiny), which are invisible to the recipient. Here’s how it works: The sender of the email embeds a so-called web bug or pixel tracker into the content of the message or possibly inside an attached PDF, Word or PowerPoint. But more recently, it has become a tool used by employers, sales people, bill collectors, lawyers, political candidates, nonprofit fund-raisers and maybe also that guy you met at a bar and regrettably gave your contact information to. The technology has been used by email marketers and Nigerian fraudsters for more than a decade. Merely clicking or tapping to open a message can transmit to the sender not only that you opened it, but also where you were when you did so and on what device, among other things. But less well known is that you can be tracked simply by opening an email. By now you probably know that browsing the web leaves you open to tracking by Internet service providers, website operators and advertisers.

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