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Comment by symfoniq | Hacker News Reader

Unless I'm misunderstanding how this new feature is implemented, tracking pixels will still work, but the data that can be gleaned from them will be more generic (the IP address will belong to a proxy).

Senders that are using these pixels to measure engagement (as opposed to building user profiles) shouldn't have much to worry about.

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"Mail Privacy Protection works by hiding your IP address and loading remote content privately in the background, even when you don't open the message."

Does this give Apple an excuse to send the content of received emails to their servers, for the background proxy loading process? "Even when you don't open the message" is very creepy to me. I'm suspicious of any company that wants to read my emails to 'protect' my privacy.

Not necessarily. Tracking pixels are implemented using images (usually transparent ones), so all Apple Mail needs to do is send the image URLs to the proxies, not the entire contents of the email. What they're actually doing remains to be seen.

The simplest implementation here would probably be something where the server pulls a copy of images and then bundles them into an inline blob in the IMAP email storage.

They're "reading your emails" for functionality like spam filtering anyway. This seems like it would work on basically the same level as that kind of stuff.

> They're "reading your emails" for functionality like spam filtering anyway. This seems like it would work on basically the same level as that kind of stuff.

This is how Gmail started as well, and now Gmail is a big source of profiling info for Google advertising.

For most people using iPhones, Apple is not providing the server. On most iPhones the Mail app is hooked up to Gmail, company email, etc.

So it will be interesting to see how Apple inserts itself into that setup to implement the image proxy.

> They're "reading your emails" for functionality like spam filtering anyway.

Except for iCloud addresses, I'm pretty sure that that's not true for Apple Mail.

This is a great question. A lot of orgs issue iPhones and hook them up to “on-prem” corporate email servers that they own and operate. They would NOT be happy to find out that all their email copies are suddenly being copied to Apple.

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