Apple Is Killing Email Read Receipts With a Single Popup
The new Mail Privacy Protection feature ensures that email marketers can no longer track your activity
Spoiler alert: If you’re reading this piece through the latest Apple Mail app update on macOS 12 or iOS 15 (currently in beta), I won’t be able to know it.
A lot of people were bummed when Apple didn’t announce new hardware during WWDC 2021 Keynote event and Silicon chips hogged the limelight once again.
However, privacy has always been at the heart of Apple and they ensured it stays the major selling point this year as well.
When the Keynote started, a good fifty minutes were given to showcase subtle software upgrades and enhancements in Apple’s stocks apps. It felt slowish for a while, and many of us might’ve snoozed off.
Yet the first mention of “privacy” was enough for everyone to sit up and take notice.
Following up on a tense year that was marred with criticism over the iOS 14 App Tracking Transparency feature, few were expecting a major privacy announcement this time.
But Apple knows how to surprise us. And they did that in style!
With just twelve words, Apple managed to freak the hell out of every email marketer and newsletter publisher:
Such was the magnanimity of the new announcements that by the end of the security section in the Keynote, I’m sure plenty of marketers would’ve immediately set up a hands-on-deck meeting with their advertising teams.
Apple confirmed that despite the hoopla surrounding digital advertising losses for small businesses, App Tracking Transparency isn’t going anywhere.
Instead, the iPhone maker is only doubling down on it by coming after the most classic and best form of marketing: Emails.
Apple’s Mail App Prevents Marketers From Tracking You Without Consent
Who knew emails were such an invasive form of tracking? Despite it being obvious in hindsight, I didn’t.
As it stands, most marketing emails today ship with tracking pixels. A pixel is an image unit and email senders would typically embed them as a tiny invisible rectangle so that it’s privy to the naked eye.
So any time you open an email, there’s a good chance that the invisible image gets loaded and pings the server. In doing so, the sender gets a hold of your information such as IP address, type of device, and location along with monitoring your click activity behavior.
While a lot of email marketers use this responsibly to measure user engagement, analyze headlines that work, and improve their success rate for the future, still it’s easily misused.
A marketer can sell your information to third-party services. Data, such as the kind of operating system, your demography and interests, are immensely valuable and can help advertisers narrow down on you and build shadow profiles for targeted marketing.
No wonder we get so many email ads based on Google searches. You might have observed the seemingly large number of follow-up emails. This happens because the sender already knows you’ve read their emails.
The thought of marketers adapting their content based on email behavior gives a nightmare of a dystopian future.
Gladly, Apple has put an end to this.
When your launch Apple’s Mail app on iOS 15, you’d get an opt-in Mail Privacy Protection popup — like the one in the header image of this story (yes, I clicked it on my iOS 15 powered iPhone 6s device and am elated it got the update).
The dialog asks whether you want to protect your mail activity. If you select “Protect Your Mail Activity” Apple would then block the image tracking pixels, mask your IP address and location from the sender.
Apple might’ve just killed email tracking with one popup
It’s a no-brainer that even a non-tech savvy user won’t click on the “Don’t protect Mail activity” button.
This not only marks the end of email read receipts but also makes it difficult for email marketers to track people. To put it straight, Apple has literally put the whole email marketing business in a dumpster.
Mail Privacy Protection Will Have a Bigger Impact than App Tracking Transparency
If you compare iOS 14’s App Tracking Transparency feature with Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15, the latter might not seem like a big deal as the feature is already present in a form in the prior iOS versions — just a little hard to discover since it’s buried in the iPhone settings.
By bringing the popup to the forefront, Apple puts forth an aggressive pro-privacy stance — and unlike App Tracking Transparency (ATT) which relied on iOS app developers to implement the feature, Mail Privacy Privacy Protection is completely in Apple’s control. This means Apple doesn’t need to give third parties developers more time — as they did with ATT by delaying the feature for almost a year.
It’s good to know that the first iOS 15 beta already ships with Mail Privacy Protection in Apple’s pre-installed Mail app.
Despite ATT’s usefulness, it was only relevant to iOS and iPadOS applications. macOS apps were hardly impacted given there are so few of them. This is another zone where Mail Privacy Protection has the edge as the feature is set to roll out on the latest macOS update too.
True, Gmail, Spark, and Outlook are arguably the more popular email client apps and provide a far better experience than Apple’s Mail app.
Yet, Apple’s default market share is pretty significant — more than 50 percent — not surprising as Apple Mail is the default email app and most non-tech savvy users can’t figure out how to switch email clients and generally leave things at default settings.
Along with the New Privacy Relay Feature, Apple Is About to Make Advertisers Feel the Squeeze
Despite best efforts, advertisers always figure out a way to track you. Facebook tried to gaslight iOS 14 users by depicting personalized ads as good for relevant ads and to keep things free. Google is working on FLoC, a replacement of cookies that groups users in cohorts.
So one could argue that email marketers might eventually find a way. For example, by adding website links in the mail body to redirect recipients to the browser? Gladly Apple eliminates this web-based tracking approach as well through a new privacy relay feature.
Safari already has an Intelligent Tracking Protection (ITP) to block third-party analytic trackers. Now, with iOS 15, Apple introduces “Privacy Relay” and “Hide My Email” feature as a part of iCloud+, a paid plan.
Privacy Relay ensures nobody, not even Apple can track your browsing activity. In simple terms, it’s a two-factored VPN that masks your browsing IP address by passing it through multiple proxy servers. In doing so, no single entity holds enough records to identify who you are.
Essentially, Privacy Relay makes it impossible for anyone to track an individual’s footprints on the web — further adding to the woes of advertisers.
If you connect the dots between Mail Privacy Protection with Privacy Relay, Apple has actually shielded its users from advertisers on the entire web.
This would hurt the growing newsletter platforms like Substack, Revue, and MailChimp more than anyone else. Facebook is already shipping out its own newsletter for creators and might be dissing at Apple right now.
Apple Will Benefit the Most from the Newsletter Crackdown
Rewind a decade or two, and privacy was considered a boring tech-heavy thing. The regular user would only come across it when their system forced a security update (remember those boring Windows popups?).
Today, privacy is the biggest talking point. Users are more aware of the importance of their data and Apple can take some credit for it.
To conclude that Apple has done this solely for customer satisfaction would be an overstatement. The company certainly has its own incentives which doesn’t go down well with everyone. Case in point, content creators.
A lot of content creators today run independent newsletters. Knowing click-open rates is a valuable metric to gauge if their work resonates. It also helps bring sponsorships and make a living without promoting ads. To their dismay, Apple has created a hole in its newsletter business.
To add that, Apple does have a knack for selling privacy as a feature (read: Privacy Relay). Besides, China is exempt from Privacy Relay — which highlights how Apple has a bias towards profits than privacy.
All said! Mail Privacy Protection is indeed a good addition to users’ privacy arsenal. But it’s even better for Apple which has been pushing towards subscription-based services — and hence fewer incentives to back email marketers. It’s not like Apple doesn’t want to make money from ads. They simply don’t need to. There’s already a loyal customer base that shells out money on every Apple product and service.
I do foresee Apple News getting more traction going forward. We saw it getting integrated with iMessage to harbor social connections. So, Apple pivoting News+ into a full-fledged newsletter platform isn’t off the table yet.
