The new EU consent guidelines and the impact on email open tracking

Understand the tracking regulations recently passed in Italy and France, and how you might be impacted as a Constant Contact customer

Disclaimer: This article is intended to provide general information and isn't a substitute for legal advice. Laws and regulations vary by industry, location, and the jurisdictions where your contacts are located, so we recommend consulting with your legal counsel to determine how they apply to your business.

Recent guidance published in France and Italy requires that email tracking consent must be gathered independently from standard marketing email consent for French and Italian email recipients. These email recipients must have the ability to revoke their tracking consent at any given time without needing to fully unsubscribe from marketing communications.

What is an email tracking pixel?
What France and Italy announced
What is Constant Contact doing in response?

What is an email tracking pixel?

Tracking in emails is captured using a tracking pixel, which is a 1x1 invisible image containing a unique recipient identifier. The pixel reveals:

• Email Openings - Every initial and repeat open
• Reading Time - Precise date and timestamp
• Location - Approximate region via IP address

In Constant Contact, email tracking pixels are used for reporting purposes, including email opens and clicks. This tracking data is also used when creating contact segments and setting up automations based on email activity. Therefore, if email tracking is turned off for certain customers, reporting, segmentation, and automation capabilities within Constant Contact are all impacted.

What France and Italy announced

France’s CNIL and Italy’s Garante have both ruled that in order to use tracking pixels in marketing emails to French and Italian recipients, the recipient must provide explicit consent, independent from standard marketing email consent.

Who is in scope

The regulations apply to any recipient who is located in France or Italy. The sender’s location - even if it is outside of France or Italy - does not matter.

What requires consent vs what doesn’t

The following requires consent:

• Open Rate Metrics - Measuring open rates for campaign performance reporting.
• Behavioral Triggers - Automated sequences like abandoned cart, win-back, and re-engagement.
• Open-Based Segmentation - Grouping contacts by whether they opened specific campaigns.
• Personalization - Behaviors used for send-time optimization and adaptive content.

What doesn’t require consent:

• Deliverability Monitoring - Confirming emails reach inboxes at a technical level, with no tracking data stored against individual contacts.
• Database Hygiene - Identifying inactive contacts to purge records, provided data used is minimal and never retained for other purposes.
• Transactional Emails - Confirmations, password resets, or shipping updates are exempt from prior consent, but only if used for purely technical or security reasons.

Deadlines 

For recipients located in France, the deadline to alert existing contacts and allow for objection was July 14, 2026. Now that the deadline has passed, explicit consent is required from all existing and new contacts. 

For recipients located in Italy, senders have until October 28, 2026 to alert all existing contacts collected prior to April 29, 2026 about the regulations and allow them to object via an unsubscribe link in the email footer.

What is Constant Contact doing in response?

Constant Contact has reviewed the details of the new regulations, and will roll out changes in a phased approach. Phase 1 allows for account-level tracking to be disabled upon request. If your organization needs account-level tracking disabled in order to be compliant, please contact our Support team.

Following Phase 1, we will roll out additional changes in Phase II.

Questions?