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Gmails prefetch is terrible for privacy because it honors http cache headers, which means tracking companies simply use a "no-cache, must-revalidate" header to
by londons_explore 9mo ago
Gmails prefetch is terrible for privacy because it honors http cache headers, which means tracking companies simply use a "no-cache, must-revalidate" header to defeat it.
- hedora 9mo agoThat sounds like a feature, not a bug, given where Google’s revenue comes from.
- direwolf20 9mo agoGoogle's revenue comes from Google's ads, not other people's ads, and they already know when you open your emails. They should block remote loading, to ensure their ad platform works better than other people's.
- RobotToaster 9mo agoWhich is completely stupid since images in an email should never change.
- iamacyborg 9mo agoWhy shouldn't they? There's plenty of scenarios where you might want to swap images after a period of time has elapsed, or to fix a mistake.
- londons_explore 9mo agoThe ability to swap images but not text seems arbitrary. You could imagine a system more like the notification tray on iOS/Android where at any time a notification can appear, be edited, timeout, or be deleted. Your email inbox could be like that. The email saying "Your parcel has been dispatched" could be edited to say "Your parcel has been delivered". When you refund something you've bought, the original purchase receipt could be crossed out or hidden. When you get invited to a wedding but then the wedding is cancelled, the original invite could be deleted, etc.
- afavour 9mo agoIt's counter to the principle of what e-mail is. It's supposed to be static. Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
- iamacyborg 9mo ago> It's supposed to be static. Says who? It's not in the original RFC as far as I'm aware.
- SahAssar 9mo agoI'm pretty sure the original RFC (RFC 821) does not include remote resources and it was written far before HTML or HTTP was invented. It was text delivered over SMTP.
- Tagbert 9mo agospecifically to prevent this kind of tracking
- hvb2 9mo agoI know of an invoicing system that updates the image when it's paid. Seems pretty useful to me. And yes, that means that an image with an amount is publicly accessible, so what, there's no information about the invoice in there as that's in the text of the email.
- SiempreViernes 9mo agoBet they send a separate mail when you paid though, in which case updating the picture is not much more than a means for them to hide errors. I subscribed to the daily headlines from a newspaper, they delivered them as a remote picture in the mail. Only it was always the same remote picture each day, just updated. So if you didn't open the mail each day too bad: you snooze you loose, those past headlines are gone.