Stop email tracking with tools from Apple and DuckDuckGo

I subscribe to a lot of newsletters. I read most of them, too. But their authors wouldn’t know it because I’ve disabled the trackers that detect and tell the senders when subscribers open their emails. It’s nothing personal; I just don’t want anyone knowing what I read, when, how many times I read it, the device I read it on, and even where I was when I read it. How about you?

Oh, you didn’t know it was possible for email senders to know all of that about you just because you clicked open? It very much is, and it happens a lot — in newsletters and marketing emails especially. But trackers aren’t limited to them. Anyone can sneak a tracker into your email; services that do this are plentiful and free. If you’re the kind of person who turns off read receipts on texts and DMs, this is probably not good news to read.

While it’s creepy to think of your email reading habits being tracked, that’s not the only reason why you should consider taking a few extra steps to protect your email. Your email address has become one of your best and most persistent identifiers, and data brokers and marketers will match what you do with it in one place with what you’ve used it for in others. That helps them build an ever-more-comprehensive profile of your online (and offline) life. You might be fine with getting emails from the store you gave your address to, or even that store knowing whether you opened their emails. You might not be so fine with a bunch of other companies you have no relationship with knowing it, too. But that’s exactly what happens.

There’s also the security factor. Emails get leaked in data breaches all the time, and there’s a lot a determined hacker can do with your email address, especially since email addresses often double as logins. If a company doesn’t have your real email address, that’s one less thing you have to worry about getting out there if (or, really, when) that company gets hacked.

The good news is there are ways to better protect your email privacy. A new one just dropped: DuckDuckGo, the privacy-first search engine provider, just opened up its Email Protection service after a year of beta testing. Apple, Firefox, and Proton have similar offerings, each with its own pros and cons.

Here are a few services and ways to make your email more private and why you should consider using them. These aren’t the only companies offering these services, but they each have a reputation for protecting their users’ privacy. In some cases, that’s their mission statement.

Disguise your email address

One of the best ways to protect your email privacy is also one of the most obvious: Don’t give your email address out in the first place. But email addresses are valuable, so companies will do whatever they can to get them. Maybe they’ll require you to give them your email address if you want to order anything, or they’ll dangle a nice juicy discount in front of you in exchange for it.

One solution is to use a service that gives you an alias email address, which redirects messages to the inbox of your choice. That way, you can get all the emails (and coupons) in your real inbox without the senders knowing what your real address is.

Perhaps the best-known example of this is Apple’s “Hide My Email” feature. I use this, so I can tell you that it works as promised. I get unlimited aliases and use a different one everywhere. But, as seems to be the case with everything Apple, it works much better within the Apple ecosystem than it does outside of it. If you’re logged into your iCloud account, using an Apple device, going through Apple’s Safari browser, or using sign in with Apple, then Hide My Email will pop up as an option at email prompts. Creating and entering your fake email address is about as easy as entering your real one.

But if you’re using a non-Apple product or service, the process becomes significantly more time-consuming and annoying. Another drawback is that it costs money. You have to have an iCloud+ account, which starts at 99 cents a month and includes other things, like expanded cloud storage. So while Hide My Email is a good feature for some, it’s probably not the best option for all.

DuckDuckGo’s Email Protection, on the other hand, is free. And it’s available on most web browsers if you install DuckDuckGo’s extension, which you can get through DuckDuckGo’s site or your browser’s extension store (the notable exception being Safari, though DuckDuckGo says that’s in the works). After that, it’ll pop up automatically as an option whenever there’s an email prompt, similar to Hide My Mail. You get as many aliases as you want, set-up is simple, and it’s got a few other features that I’ll get into later.

There’s also