Abstract
Tracking technologies have become ubiquitous, not only on websites but also in email messages. However, while protection and transparency tools exist for the web, no such tools exist for email messages, thus obscuring privacy violations. We introduce the PrivacyMail platform to assist with the automated analysis of email messages. The platform automatically analyzes commercial mailing lists, making it easier to detect different forms of tracking. Our platform introduces transparency about the practices of companies, and serves as a tool for regulators, data protection professionals and consumers alike. Our preliminary results show widespread email tracking, where opening an email can result in information being sent to up to 13 third parties, in some cases disclosing the users’ email address in the process.
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Notes
- 1.
See Table 12 of [4] for an overview of eMail client behavior.
- 2.
Differentiating between these cases automatically is challenging, as standard tracker blocking lists have been shown to be unreliable when applied to email tracking [4].
- 3.
We were unable to find details about this company, but hashed email address leaks to this company have also been observed by Englehardt et al. [4].
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Acknowledgements
This work has been co-funded by the DFG as part of project C.1 within the RTG 2050 “Privacy and Trust for Mobile Users”.
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Maass, M., Schwär, S., Hollick, M. (2019). Towards Transparency in Email Tracking. In: Naldi, M., Italiano, G., Rannenberg, K., Medina, M., Bourka, A. (eds) Privacy Technologies and Policy. APF 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11498. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21752-5_2
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