Dedup on image data has no bearing on the information advertisers can collect. On image URLs it will cause advertisers to append query strings to image paths. G

Dedup on image data has no bearing on the information advertisers can collect. On image URLs it will cause advertisers to append query strings to image paths. Google can't win that particular arms race, but grabbing the images on email receipt instead of on email viewing neutralises any gains from that win. One point nobody has raised yet, though, is that there could be valid use-cases for the sneaky stuff people were doing before. Images generated on the server that reflect current (updated or updating) info could be handy. It might even be worth serving different images to different clients based on user-agent strings. I'm skeptical on both counts, though.