Italy’s data protection authority, the Garante, says companies, platforms and newsletters must bring their notices, consents and revocation tools into line with its email tracking-pixel guidelines “Entro il 29 ottobre 2026”, by October 29, according to its own news item of October 5. Read in full, provvedimento n. 284 draws the line through the open rate itself: an anonymised, aggregate count of overall opens needs no consent, while individual open tracking used to tune campaigns does. The same text also uses the word “univoci” in two opposite senses. This is an Italian authority applying Italian law, not an EU-wide rule.
Do email tracking pixels need consent in Italy?
Usually yes. Prior consent is the Garante’s ordinary requirement. Its examples of exemptions: an anonymised aggregate count of the overall open percentage, authentication and security mail, and legally required service or institutional mail where actual receipt matters. Individual open tracking used to improve campaigns needs consent. Every pixel must be disclosed beforehand, whatever the email’s purpose.
The guidelines were adopted on April 17 and published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale (n. 98) on April 29, 2026. They rest on art. 122 of the Italian Privacy Code, the national version of ePrivacy art. 5(3). The text sets a deadline of “6 mesi dal momento della loro pubblicazione in Gazzetta Ufficiale” (six months from publication, our translation) and gives no calendar date. The October 29 date comes from the Garante’s news item and its newsletter n. 553 of October 8.
The background is two inspections, on October 6-8, 2025 at an email provider (“provider di servizi di posta elettronica”) and on February 9-11, 2026 at a marketing-automation platform that sends email on behalf of clients. They found pixels in use “pressoché nella totalità dei casi” (in practically all cases), in commercial and service mail alike.
Where does the open rate cross the line?
The exemption is narrow. It applies when a pixel serves “un conteggio di tipo statistico che misuri la percentuale globale di apertura dei messaggi” (a statistical count measuring the overall open percentage, our translation). Such statistics “impongono l’adozione di tecniche di anonimizzazione” (require anonymisation techniques, our translation), so that personalised measurement is not possible. The Garante suggests pixels that are “non differenziati per ciascun utente, ma uguali per tutti i destinatari di una stessa campagna” (not differentiated for each user, but the same for all recipients of one campaign, our translation), and anonymising the related technical data such as IP address and client.
Here “univoci” needs care. The Garante suggests “pixel univoci” and glosses them as one pixel shared by the whole campaign. But in section 1(b) it writes that “di regola i tracciatori sono univoci per singolo destinatario” (as a rule, trackers are unique per recipient, our translation), describing a pixel that carries a user ID, message ID and the IP address. The two uses point in opposite directions, so read the gloss, not the word. Nothing in the text says the aggregate exemption covers per-recipient pixels.
| Use of the pixel | What the Garante says |
|---|---|
| No consent needed (Garante’s examples, with conditions) | |
| Aggregate open percentage | Statistical count only, anonymised so measurement cannot be personalised; one pixel for all recipients of a campaign suggested |
| Authentication and security | Account activation, password change, data-rights requests |
| Legally required service or institutional mail | Where actual receipt matters, such as fraud warnings, contract or privacy-notice changes, deadline reminders |
| Consent needed (Garante’s examples) | |
| Individual open analysis for campaigns | Changing subject lines after low opens, improving relevance or readability |
| Frequency and stopping sends | Adapting frequency, or stopping after a controller-set number of unopened messages |
| Profiling | Using read data to infer tastes and interests for commercial profiles |
How does consent work, and what about lists already running?
For new contacts, the Garante prefers consent at the moment the address is collected. In principle, one consent can cover both marketing emails and pixels, “un unico consenso informato” (a single informed consent, our translation), provided the request is neutral and puts no pressure on the person.
Revocation has to be easy and can be granular. The Garante’s example is a standard icon or a footer link in every email that lets people unsubscribe or stop only the pixels while still receiving mail without them. Refusing tracking must not limit the service, and every choice must be recorded. The pixel-only opt-out echoes a French cookie ruling we covered: in Conseil d’État Rejects Orange’s Appeal: A Cookie Read After Withdrawal Is the Breach, what counted after withdrawal was the read.
Lists that already exist get a transitional regime: inform people with “l’inoltro del primo messaggio utile” (the first useful message), and announce and offer granular revocation. The Garante expects this to give way to prior consent as new processing starts.
What should senders check before the date?
Start with what your pixel carries. The open-count exemption is built around anonymised, campaign-wide counting, not per-recipient IDs. For tracking that does run per recipient, the Garante’s privacy-by-design suggestion is an unintelligible, non-sequential identifier mapped to the address in a separate internal layer, so the address never travels in the pixel request. That identifier is still tied to each address, so on its own it does not make the count anonymous.
Then look at what the data feeds. Subject-line changes after low opens, send-frequency rules and logic that stops sending after a set number of unopened messages all appear among the Garante’s consent examples. Then add the notice and the revocation link.
The Garante notes that checking how the guidelines are applied is among its planned inspection activities for the second half of 2026. The sources we reviewed state no penalty amounts specific to these guidelines and no results yet from those compliance inspections. For how the EDPB’s draft fine guidelines handle a website-pixel example, see EDPB Fine Guidelines: A Worked Pixel Example Ends in a Reprimand, Not a Fine. The Garante’s April press release and trade write-ups such as Cybersecurity360 and DWF summarise the text. We found no English version linked from the Garante’s page for the guidelines; every translation here is ours.