Open About the Open-Rate?

Abstract

While many suspected that commercial email communications would be obsolete by 2020, email still continues to prevail over other mediums in terms of bringing revenue. In order to take full advantage of this valuable channel, commercial emails are tagged with tracking measures that at the very least enable senders to obtain individual read receipts for their emails. The collection of these read receipts, referred to as the open-rate, is used to measure the success of the campaign. In this paper we investigate the implications of email tracking, as it is used for obtaining open-rates, on recipients' privacy. In addition, we demonstrate the prevalence of email tracking in marketing emails of 736 websites and provide suggestions for mitigating its privacy risk.