The tracking methods used by advertising companies such as Google and Facebook vary, but the most popular is to tracking you through emails.

These companies use promotional messages in order to collect a huge amount of data about you, and use it to target you with advertisements.

Tracking you through emails

Email tracking uses tracking pixels technology that is hidden in images and inserted into the header, footer, or body of the email. It is a single image that is invisible and loads automatically when you open the message allowing ad companies to track and target you later with ads.

Tracking pixels can collect a lot of data about you, which is collected together to form a digital fingerprint about you in order to target you with ads.

The possibility of knowing your exact geographic location is worrying, as it is used to analyze your daily habits and find out where you live and work.

The ability to track users via email allows almost any company to have a detailed account of their customers.

For example, if a clothing and book store cooperates, the clothing store learns about your reading habits. This data can be used to market clothes to you based on your reading habits.

How to stop companies from tracking you through emails

Image upload feature should be turned off by default in incoming messages, this can improve your privacy. But it may also affect the usage experience. You will only see images in any incoming messages, including newsletters, by downloading them manually.

And if you use Gmail, you can block image uploads or use other options like the Ugly Email extension for Google Chrome and Firefox. This extension checks your Gmail inbox for messages that contain tracking pixels and blocks them.

There are also some privacy-focused providers that offer a paid service to block images by default in incoming messages such as ProtonMail and Basecamp that block tracking pixels and tell you if a message includes any tracking pixels.