Tiktok sends you an email, and a small picture on that email is automatically downloaded. Tictok tracks that image by sending out unique ones to each email, so they know that when this particular image is downloaded, it means that this particular email address has opened the email.

So in effect, all they're actually getting is confirmation of which emails are actually getting opened, and when? If that's correct, it seems pretty easy to deal with just... don't open emails from tiktok?

[–] jokro@feddit.org 5 points 3 days ago

The wikipedia article only mentions this, but the bbc article linked in the post explains "tracking pixels" better

[–] einkorn@feddit.org 4 points 3 days ago

In general that's how it works.

Now the difficult part is: It's not just TikToks mails you have to avoid, but many other companies include ad-tech from TikTok, Facebook, Google, etc. in their mails because they want to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and sell on the information. Just like every commercial website nowadays includes Google Analytics.