Late in 2021, Apple changed the way email opens are triggered in order to better protect their users' privacy when using Apple devices. Specifically, their new system aims to prevent any tracking tools, including the technology used by Relata to capture interactions, from providing information about their users. This has been prompted due to an increase in the number of tools which collect sensitive and identifiable information about their users; something which Relata does not do.
To better understand how this impacts the insights you see, our data science team have analysed the changes in behaviour across tens of thousands of emails and hundreds of companies. Based on their findings, we have introduced a new algorithm which is able to highlight when an email has most likely been screened by an Apple device, and would have previously been incorrectly shown as a Read interaction.
To reflect this in the product, we have changed these interactions to the ‘Privacy read’ interaction type, which flags the Reads we believe are most likely to have been triggered by the new Apple system, and are not necessarily a real human recipient.
No algorithm is 100% accurate, however we can see from readership trends that our action has removed any significant affects on readership caused by Apple's new system.
