Your email tracker has 24 hours to live

If your organisation sends marketing emails to anyone in France or Italy, you’ve got a problem, even if you’re not based there.

Both countries’ data protection authorities (CNIL and Garante) have decided most email tracking pixels (those hidden images that spy on open rates, devices, locations, etc) are storage on someone’s device. Exactly like cookies.

That means that, like for cookies, prior explicit consent is now required. Real consent. The opt-in, separate checkbox, explain-yourself-clearly kind of consent. Not the “check our privacy policy” kind. Even if you can legally send these emails under an opt-out regime, this is separate.

France – Deadline: 14th July 2026

CNIL published its recommendation on 14th April with a three-month transition window for any addresses collected before that date. Right up until this Tuesday, you can keep pixel-tracking old contacts if you told them and gave them a way to opt out (and they didn't). Anyone added after 14th April, though? No grace period. You needed consent yesterday.

Italy – deadline: 28th October 2026

Same idea, six months instead of three. Between now and then you're meant to be actively migrating people to a consent-based setup, not just sitting on your hands. After the 28th, it's prior explicit consent, same as France, with only a few narrow exceptions.

What I’d do

Unless you have an extremely clean database, trying to figure out “is this recipient in France or Italy?” is a fool’s errand. People move, forward their emails, use work emails based in other countries, and more. Add all the anti-tracking technologies like Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection to that, or all the email servers that pre-fetch images, and your open-rate numbers were already mostly noise pretending to be signal.

So, either add the opt-in for everyone, not just the two countries in scope. It's the only version of this that doesn't require you to be a jurisdiction-guessing psychic.

Or, and this is the part I’d go for, just switch the tracking off. It was lying to you anyway.

Colin