Foiling Electronic Snoops in #Email - The New York Times
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/technology/personaltech/foiling-electronic-snoops-in-email.html
IT didn’t take much for Florian Seroussi, a technology investor in Manhattan, to become suspicious of his email.
His misgivings were sparked late one night last year when he opened a message from an entrepreneur who was asking him to invest in a start-up. Minutes later, Mr. Seroussi’s cellphone rang with a call from the same start-up executive.
Coincidence? Not to Mr. Seroussi. “What are the odds that at 10:30 at night, a guy suddenly has a vision that I’m reading his email?” he said. “They must know something that I don’t.”
It turned out that the start-up executive had planted a tracking mechanism into his message to Mr. Seroussi, a trend that is increasingly afflicting all of our email. Trackers, which come in many forms including a single invisible pixel inserted into an email or the hyperlinks embedded inside a message, are frequently being used to detect when someone opens a message and even where that person is when the email is opened. By some estimates, trackers are now used in as much as 60 percent of all sent emails.