[LINK] GMail clobbers image tracking in ads

[Scott Howard]

Although what you've included below is what is widely being reported, it is
NOT what Google is currently doing.

Google is currently NOT pre-downloading images, but instead are downloading
it and caching it the first time that it is accessed.  They are also moving
towards displaying images by default for all emails (although this can be
disabled on a per-user basis).

This has a number of impacts, both good and bad, on privacy/user
tracking/etc.

It does NOT stop marketers from telling that you have opened their email.
In fact, by turning images on by default they now know with a higher degree
of certainty that you have opened their email - previously they would have
only know this if you had auto-download of images enabled for that specific
sender, and/or if you clicked on the "show images" link to view the images
on a per-message basis.

It DOES stop marketers from telling it you open a message multiple times,
as they only see the request the first time, after which Google caches it.
 A few companies are reporting that they are seeing multiple opens (eg,
Return Path) which might mean that this is dependent on the servers
anti-caching settings, but at this stage it doesn't seem clear exactly what
is required to disable the caching.

In it's currently implement, it also stops marketers from obtaining
specific information about you, such as your IP address (and thus location)
and your User-Agent string (thus OS/Computer/Browser/etc settings), as
Google is replacing both of these and not currently forwarding the original
version.

Although Google only announced this a day or two back the underlying change
actually happened over a week ago, so there's been a lot of time for people
to understand exactly what is occurring and the impact, before Google even
announced that they were doing it...

There's a good level-headed analysis of the changes, including links to
multiple blogs from ESP's, at
http://blog.wordtothewise.com/2013/12/faq-about-opens-and-gmail-caching/

  Scott



On Sun, Dec 15, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Jim Birch <planetjim at gmail.com> wrote:

> Google have announced that they will begin cacheing the images in email
> ads.  Advertisers load emails with uniquely-named images that are
> downloaded at the time the mail is displayed.  This allows them to track
> stuff like whether the email was viewed, at what time, by what client, at
> what geolocation, and so on.  Many clients including GMail would ask your
> permission before downloading images to limit this tracking.  Under the new
> way of doing things the images are predownloaded by Google servers so the
> advertiser loses information on if/when/where/etc the email is read (unless
> you actually click on a link.)
>
> This is something of a privacy bonus wrt random unknown
> advertisers/spammers, plus, a small step towards world domination by
> Google. Now, only Google know if you read the email.
>
>
> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail-blows-up-e-mail-marketing-by-caching-all-images-on-google-servers/
>
> - Jim
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