Down to the last pixel

Your emails are your business. Out of the corner of your eye, discreetly, many of the messages you receive, advertisements and newsletters, contain small, invisible files, most often a one-pixel-by-one-pixel image, that provide valuable information to the sender. This makes it possible to determine whether an email was opened, when it was opened, on what type of device, computer or phone, and in which geographic region. All of this valuable data enhances understanding of customers and prospects, enabling companies to better tailor their next campaign.

Strongly urged by the CNIL, in a recommendation dated April 14, 2026, to better inform consumers about the use of their data within three months, many companies complied at the last minute, just before the July 14 holiday weekend. In a matter-of-fact manner, most companies inform recipients of the presence of a tracking pixel in their emails, inviting them, in the best-case scenario, to confirm or decline tracking, or, in some cases, to leave the default setting unchanged. Many recipients won’t read these messages. An email’s open rate varies greatly depending on the sender and the subject line. It’s quite an achievement if even one in three recipients opens an email. But that doesn’t mean they’ll actually read it.

Marketing and mass-mailing platforms and applications, such as Mailchimp, Salesforce, or HubSpot, to name just the most popular ones among businesses and organizations, enable tracking by default. With little regulatory information on their homepages for customers, the dashboards display delivery, open, click-through, and unsubscribe rates.

Digital trust cannot be mandated. Transparency helps build it

Consent. As is often the case in the digital realm, the issue goes beyond the technical. The attention economy is embedded in our every action. Many of us take offense at being tracked while happily feeding the data-collection machine, especially on social media, with a post here, a photo there. Regulators, however, are forcing us to open our eyes.

Digital trust cannot be decreed. Transparency helps build it. In fact, informed consent is becoming a prerequisite for a lasting relationship between brands and their consumers, who are also citizens. It is up to companies and organizations to embrace this constraint and turn it into an opportunity. They now have the chance to reaffirm their commitments to transparency and data protection. Loyalty is becoming a selling point.

This pixel, measuring 0.00000006 m², ten times smaller than the tiniest ant, carries significant weight. Above all, it embodies our contradictions. Starting with the illusion of free access. Without audience measurement, there is no targeted advertising; and without advertising, there are no services or content. The tracker has become the brainwave monitor for many publishers and advertisers who fear it might flatten out. If they must choose, they’d rather prioritize relevance over intrusiveness and repetition. They’d rather satisfy the needs of their customers, who are now accustomed to the slightest flattery from their favorite generative AIs, than bombard them with untimely messages.

Beyond that, the endless stream of consent requests eventually wears down even the most alert users. Who still bothers to read the cookie consent banner, those small files packed with information about everyone, before accepting it? Multiplying consent windows protects no one. Weariness strips consent of its meaning.

In these times of heightened sovereignty, abandoning measurement tools in the name of privacy would run the risk of becoming even more dependent on platforms, mostly American, with the most popular one being Chinese (TikTok), under the pretext of fighting them.

This article was originally published in French in l’Opinion