Security News > 2021 > November > Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection feature – watch out if you have a Watch!
Heads-up: The mail privacy protection introduced in iOS 15 doesn't apply to the Mail app on the Apple Watch.
The idea is quite neat and simple: to shield you from annoying marketing tricks such as tracking pixels, you can ask Apple to fetch your remote email content first, and then relay it to to you indirectly, thus using Apple as a proxy for images and links in your messages.
As a result, modern browsers and email clients generally offer built-in anti-tracking features to help limit the precision of online tracking and therefore to improve your privacy somewhat.
The Tommy Mysk/Talal Haj Bakry cyberduo noticed that this IP anonymisation doesn't work on the Apple Watch.
So tracking pixels embedded in emails you view on your iPhone will be shielded by this feature, but will give away your real IP number if the same email is viewed via your Watch.
Even though you set up your Apple Watch by pairing it with your iPhone, and then configure it via the iOS 15 menus, it's not actually running iOS 15 itself.