It devalues other tracking solutions, and makes Google's own paid analytics services more compelling. So users will still be tracked, but the trackers are more likely to have to share some of the money and data with Google.

Google offer paid email analytics? Out of interest do they have a free version like they do for websites too? All I can find online are things like [0] showing how to use web analytics to track emails etc.

[0] https://plus.google.com/+DanielWaisberg/posts/XDrRoh3GoVP

Badly: http://blog.movableink.com/gmails-recent-image-handling-chan...

To clarify, it's bad for marketing people, but good for users desiring privacy.

To an extent - it seems that google indirectly confirms that emails are received (even though additional data is lost).

A outfit like Yesware provides rough location data w/ their pixels.

FWIW, they're partially funded by Google Ventures- perhaps there is some type of technical compromise that doesn't break geographic tracking completely: http://www.yesware.com/blog/2012/07/18/how-does-yesware-trac...

I believe they still have an "Ask before displaying external images" setting.

Yes, but it is unclear whether their servers will load them regardless of whether or not they're sent to my browser.

But surely ALL emails to @gmail.com are received.

How can this possibly do anything but enable tracking? They can just embed hmac(secret, your_email).png.

Tracking is currently only useful insofar as receiving a URL request for the image indicates that someone opened the email, as well as providing whatever metadata is available via the request, through geo-locating the request IP or what-have-you.

This change makes all of that impossible: Google will (presumably) always request your image URL, whether the user opens the email or not, and the request will come from Google, with their metadata, not your target.

> Google will (presumably) always request your image URL

Why presumably?

Because relative to the quantity of email Gmail has to process, the images returned from tracking links are likely a drop in the bucket, and requesting them all provides their users with even better privacy protection than the "Show Images" toggle did.

If you want to be cynical, you can note that Google will still know which emails you opened and which you did not. Does the current Gmail TOS restrict them from selling that information to advertisers, or (more likely) using it to target ads? Probably not!

I suppose if they're clever, they'll figure out when a sender is serving a million copies of the same image to slightly altered URLs in the same email template, and forgo the requests, but either way, the sender loses the analytics.

If you want to be cynical (or perhaps realist), you will see this as just another effort to push marketers to paying for expanded analytics data from Google.

I doubt any of this is done with the privacy of users in mind.

It doesn't sound that bad. First, apparently only affecting 2-5% of mail. Secondly, everything works the same except for the absence of useragent and cache control headers (which aren't that helpful anyhow for analytics, especially when you're still getting those on 90%+ of your messages).

Would the image not still load only once the receiver opens it?