While this will, indeed, take away some information from email marketers, it may also give them more, different information. Now, instead of getting a lot of pe

While this will, indeed, take away some information from email marketers, it may also give them more, different information. Now, instead of getting a lot of personally identifiable information from some users (some=the percentage which still used clients that don't block image requests), they will probably get less information, but from a wider set of users - those who use the default settings in Gmail. On the one hand, their proxy solution has a positive effect for privacy, but on the other hand, the load-by-default setting has a negative effect. Either way, Google already knows which e-mails you're opening, so using an image proxy is not going to give them "even more of your data" that they didn't already have.