3 ms·
This is a step in the right direction. However, please understand that it doesn't really make a difference in forms of real privacy Googlers! The e-mail spam/
by rasengan 13y ago
This is a step in the right direction. However, please understand that it doesn't really make a difference in forms of real privacy Googlers!
The e-mail spam/list creators are a different kind of adversary than, for example, web trackers.
They will do something like this:
http www theirimageserver com/images/img53.jpg?to=you@email.com
(Obviously they will obfuscate and use some kind of hash instead of cleartext e-mail to disguise their tracking ways).
Regardless of whether
some.google.ip loads it, or your.home.ip loads it, it won't change the fact that you@email.com loaded it and your email is very active, not just active in that it didn't bounce, but active in that you actually read it.
Once again, it's a step in the right direction though, and I'm looking forward to seeing greater innovations from Google in the privacy space, because I'm confident that there are Googlers who understand that privacy is not a feature nor a PR thing... it's the difference between the preservation of humanity and society versus not.
- jackcarter 13y agoIs it possible that Google also loads images in emails sent to invalid @gmail.com addresses?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- spb 13y agoActually, if they do it on delivery, it ruins the signal (since there is no longer any distinguishing factor between active accounts and inactive accounts), so the latter protects privacy more effectively.
- eterm 13y agoYou've got that backward. If google fires off a request when you open the email, the companies can track whether you opened the email. If google fires off a request when they get the email, the company has no way to track if you opened their email. If google fires off requests to all emails they receive to @gmail.com then the marketers won't even know if it's active @gmail.com account, they'll just know that *@gmail.com is received, which isn't information, it's an easy assumption.
- rasengan 13y agoI just tried it. It loads the image on e-mail LOAD. Not prefetched. This is a privacy problem.
- herge 13y agoThey can mitigate that by downloading all images that come to any address @gmail.com. That way spammers won't know if you@gmail.com is real or not, and still be at step 0 (and hopefully taking some bandwidth/processing time/log space from the spammer at the same time!).
- rasengan 13y agoThat is very true. Hopefully, that's what is going on!
- rasengan 13y agoI just tried it. It loads the image on e-mail LOAD. Not prefetched. This is a privacy problem.
- m_ram 13y agoThis is probably obvious to people who do email marketing, but I just tested whether gmail bounces bad addresses. They do bounce addresses that have never been registered and addresses that have been deleted. This means that even before this change, spammers could find out if an address is active.
- herge 13y agoBouncing badly typed addresses is more useful for users than stymieing spammers. However, a spammer doesn't need to know if an existing gmail address is being actively used or not.
- dictum 13y agoCorrect me if I'm talking directly from my rear end: For that scenario, Google could ignore the arguments and just request the file. However, I'm not sure I get Google's implementation of the proxy, but if the images are grabbed only when the email is read, it's easy to track by adding a hash to the filename itself. So, in the email company's server, they'd have a canonical file, for instance, acme-co/dec2013news/img53.jpg. For each subscriber, they'd have something like a symbolic link to img53.jpg specific to the subscriber, for instance img53-5baa61e4c9b93f3f0682250b6cf8331b7ee68fd8.jpg. EDIT: Checked a newsletter's source and that's what they already do. Since I don't deal with email marketing much, I honestly had no idea.