Nowadays, data trackers smartly use unsolicited marketing emails to gather identifying information such as your IP address to build a custom profile. Thanks to the secretive tracking methods, they can find out whether or not you have opened the email, at what time you checked that, and how many times you looked at the message. With iOS 15, Apple aims to take on such unsolicited emails with a well-thought-out feature called “Mail Privacy Protection.” If you want to keep your web activity private, let me show you how to enable Mail Privacy Protection in iOS 15 on your iPhone.
While remote images that load on opening an email are one of the key components of tracking, advertisers use invisible pixels to collect information about the user. When a person opens the email, the code within the pixel collects the required information and sends it to the company. That’s how email tracking uses remote images and invisible pixels to build a custom profile of the user’s online activity across websites.
- Enable Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone and iPad
- Disable Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone and iPad
- How Does Mail Privacy Protection Work in iOS 15?
Enable Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone or iPad
When you open the Apple Mail app for the first time in iOS 15, you will get the prompt to protect your mail activity. However, if you missed it or skipped it, you have the option to turn on/off Mail Privacy Protection manually. Just follow the steps below:
Disable Mail Privacy Protection on iPhone and iPad
When you turn off mail privacy protection on your iPhone or iPad running iOS 15, you are greeted with two options – hide IP address and block all remote content. That means you can still block emails from tracking your activity by individually enabling either of the two or both of these features.
To ensure your personal information remains safeguarded, Mail Privacy Protection keeps your IP address hidden and loads all the remote content privately so that invisible trackers are unable to gather any of your information. Notably, this security feature loads content in the background, even when you don’t open the message. And that makes it extremely hard for advertisers to follow your mail activity. Behind the scenes, Apple employs multiple proxy services and also assigns a random IP address to keep everything under the wraps.
