Are click rates affected by privacy changes?
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Yes, and the effects pull in opposite directions depending on which privacy change you're talking about.
Security gateway scanners inflate CTR. Corporate email security tools automatically follow every link in incoming messages to check for malware. These prefetch requests register as clicks in your ESP before any human has opened the email. If a significant chunk of your list is at companies using these tools (common in B2B), your reported CTR is higher than your real CTR.
Privacy-focused mail clients deflate CTR. Some mobile email apps and privacy-first clients strip tracking parameters or block redirect chains as a feature. Real clicks happen, but they don't register in your ESP's click log. Your actual engagement is better than the number shows.
Apple Mail Privacy Protection affects CTOR more than CTR. MPP pre-fetches open pixels, which inflates the open count. Since click-to-open rate (CTOR) divides by opens, an inflated denominator makes CTOR look lower. Regular CTR, which divides by delivered emails, is less affected by MPP.
What this means in practice: your raw click numbers are noisier than they used to be. The best way to sanity-check them is to compare against downstream signals. If your ESP reports strong CTR but your analytics tool shows weak sessions or conversions from email traffic, you're probably seeing scanner inflation on one end or tracking loss on the other.
For a closer look at how scanner traffic registers, see how prefetching causes false clicks.
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