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Flood of emails about tracking pixels: new regulation at fault

LaRedaction Posted messages 866 Registration date   Status Administrator Last intervention   -  
brucine Posted messages 25093 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   -
https://fr.123rf.com/photo_116687518_message-de-connexion-de-communication-par-courrier-aux-contacts-de-messagerie-t%C3%A9l%C3%A9phone-global.html?downloaded=1
The number of informative emails about "tracking pixels" that internet users have received recently is due to a new CNIL regulation launched in June 2025. This regulation aims to regulate the use of tracking pixels, invisible trackers embedded in emails to monitor users' reading habits. They allow companies to collect technical information about the user and refine their marketing strategies, though they are sometimes deemed invasive. To counter this, services like Apple, Thunderbird and Outlook offer options to block these trackers. Furthermore, since July 14, 2026, companies using these pixels for marketing must provide a simple way for users to opt out of this tracking. And you, have you noticed changes in your internet browsing habits following this change?
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3 answers

  1. Mike
     

    I disagree with being tracked; can we stop this tracking? Thank you for the information coming soon.

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    1. brucine Posted messages 25093 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   4 172
       

      They are only a kind of specific Cookies.

      The article nevertheless details the policy regarding them: apart from those that are mandatory, they are specified, if the recipient receives an email from a site about this, it is valid and in accordance with the law to have the possibility to object on the site in question.

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  2. Nico
     

    The link I received in the Boulanger site announcement offered no option other than accepting cookies to continue receiving newsletters, or simply unsubscribing... Personally I find this a rather mediocre practice and I would be curious to know CNIL's opinion on this matter.

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    1. brucine Posted messages 25093 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   4 172
       
      Hello, As I suppose is the case for everyone, I received several of them. In a certain number of cases, a direct link allowing you to say yes or no is clearly integrated; in others it is blurry, playing with tracking pixels of "deliverability" that are not concerned. For example, today my car brand merely reminds of this function, whereas that's not true. I will skip to the 3 categories of pixels, but the first one, which is concerned (aggregated data), also tells us in the privacy policy that it "relies on our legitimate interest to measure the overall effectiveness of our campaigns," which is not acceptable, but the mail cites deliverability alone to avoid offering a direct link for agreement or opposition to what goes beyond it, and, even if the consequences are indifferent to me, it is clearly not in compliance.
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  3. contrariness Posted messages 17907 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   6 243
     

    We can also open the email in ASCII (plain text) to read it… remote links will not be clickable with an email client.
    However, via webmail I don’t think that works.

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    1. brucine Posted messages 25093 Registration date   Status Member Last intervention   4 172
       

      Yes, I did that in the past, but it isn’t very practical for reading certain emails and I mainly did it for security reasons: my current mail client isolates attachments in a separate folder and therefore even an HTML script can’t open them... but not the images which are ultimately also attachments.

      This whole pixel business doesn’t matter much to me, but where there is a pixel there is an image, so I’ll also have to try to condemn the formats concerned because even outside of soup merchants, administrative contacts who can’t send you an email without signature images, logos, photos of the registered office, and so on, it annoys me: in a communication just now from the building’s management about an issue concerning the council, there are five of them...

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