Show HN: GIF Tracking Protection – Prevent privacy-invasive 1x1 GIFs

Re:Show HN: GIF Tracking Protection – Prevent privacy-invasi... by Tagbert on Thursday April 30, 2020 @11:01AM (#23031571)

Some email clients try to block tracking by not download images unless the user requests images for a specific email.

- MS Outlook does this. Google gmail does this for some clients.

Other email clients automatically download all image references in email to a proxy server hosted by the email provider. If the user enables images for an email, the images are downloaded from the proxy server, not the sending server. This means that download logs are useless for tracking.

- Google gmail does this for some email clients.

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Re:Show HN: GIF Tracking Protection – Prevent privacy-invasi... by petercooper on Friday May 01, 2020 @10:28AM (#23042295)

This means that download logs are useless for tracking.

Depends what sort of tracking you mean. Google still only proxies the image download if you open the mail, so it can be used to track opens (which Gmail likes because they want people to auto delete non-engaging subscribers). You can't track the end user's location or IP though, which may be enough for most.

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