Monitoring pixels have been a digital advertising fixture for years. And but they’ve largely stood within the shadow of the third-party cookie, regardless of their comparable monitoring capabilities.

Monitoring pixels are successfully tiny, invisible photographs that may be embedded in internet pages and emails and used to gather data, corresponding to a tool’s IP deal with, as lined within the video above. Earlier this yr, advert safety monitoring firm Confiant found an advert tech firm using tracking pixels as part of a fingerprinting ploy that co-opted IAB Europe’s Transparency and Consent Framework.

Imperceptible as monitoring pixels could also be, they’ve garnered the eye of firms like Apple and Mozilla. The previous’s Mail Privateness Safety characteristic blocks monitoring pixels from loading in emails, which has posed a threat to email marketers. In the meantime, each Apple and Mozilla present choices of their internet browsers to equally block monitoring pixels on internet pages.