3 ms·

Honest question: Does this differ from them storing the email which already contains the pictures?

• jellicle 13y ago
  These are hyperlinks to images; they aren't attached to the email.
• shabble 13y ago
  Yes. Whilst you can embed images as MIME attachments (or data:// uri trickery and the like), the vast majority are <img> tags referencing external http:// http:// uris. A message with remote image references is not a complete document, and won't render correctly unless those references can be followed. Google are instead fetching and caching those remote references, then serving them indirectly to you. As comparison, Firefox has a 'save page' function which distinguishes between 'html only' (akin to the mail message), and 'complete', which would include all images, stylesheets, external js files, etc.
  • arsenerei 13y ago
    Fair point, I wasn't considering external links, only embedded images. Thanks.
• steven2012 13y ago
  To me, it sounds like they did all the heavy lifting for the NSA, and then packaged it up as a "feature" for us. If Google handed over the emails themselves to the NSA, it would contain a lot more noise, but now it's really simple for the NSA. The work is obviously to sift through all the emails, remove the photos, and separate/store them on a separate server. Now all NSA needs to do is get a daily dump of all the pics, and then run their data collection/facial recognition on them.