Re:A Clever Way to Tell Which of Your Emails Are Being Tracked
by aareet on Friday March 20, 2015 @10:14AM
(#9237807)
Google actually uses an image proxy to thwart tracking based on images.[1]
http://googlesystem.blogspot.ca/2013/12/google-uses-proxy-to...
Re:A Clever Way to Tell Which of Your Emails Are Being Tracked
by wtbob on Friday March 20, 2015 @10:23AM
(#9237856)
Which won't work if it's a unique image (since it won't be in the proxy). And if it is a tracking image, it'll probably be unique.
Re:A Clever Way to Tell Which of Your Emails Are Being Tracked
by rlpb on Friday March 20, 2015 @11:33AM
(#9238316)
If it's a unique image, then presumably Google reads it and pre-caches the image on receipt. So all you'll get from 1 pixel image is confirmation of email delivery, which is something you get with SMTP anyway.
Of course if Google wait to cache the image when you actually read it, then this isn't true. But I'm prepared to give them more credit than that.
Re:A Clever Way to Tell Which of Your Emails Are Being Tracked
by wtbob on Friday March 20, 2015 @06:21PM
(#9241003)
> So all you'll get from 1 pixel image is confirmation of email delivery, which is something you get with SMTP anyway.
You'll get a read-receipt, which SMTP doesn't offer.
Re:A Clever Way to Tell Which of Your Emails Are Being Tracked
by ArchReaper on Friday March 20, 2015 @10:35AM
(#9237936)
AFAIK they do this for all images. Not just commonly embedded images.
Re:A Clever Way to Tell Which of Your Emails Are Being Tracked
by petercooper on Friday March 20, 2015 @10:47AM
(#9238009)
Except it doesn't thwart tracking the actual open. Just the IP of the end user, etc: http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/12/gmail-open-rates/
I guess they "new take on mail" by google is not designed for end-users privacy.