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Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#51

Post by JimDabell »

noja wrote: post #37
bayindirh wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Download via a proxy and cache the image when you receive the e-mail. It's processed in the queue and opened. Was it the user? Did it hit Inbox? Where did it got opened? When it's opened? How many times it opened? All these information's reliability got out of the window with a single optimization. You can't know how this mail was processed and it's fate. So, your tracking pixel and URL returned something useless to…

Aha so it's not just a proxy. It's a pre-fetching proxy. Understood you. Edit: oh :(

That’s not how Gmail works and it doesn’t protect your privacy that way:

https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-...

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#52

Post by JimDabell »

bayindirh wrote: post #22
noja wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? https://jioegijogeijesgioegeg.tracking.example.com/niowefioe.png?sdgsdbuegiu=rojpopwmrmwk has four places to store unique information. Does Gooogle's proxy remove all of them?

Download via a proxy and cache the image when you receive the e-mail. It's processed in the queue and opened. Was it the user? Did it hit Inbox? Where did it got opened? When it's opened? How many times it opened? All these information's reliability got out of the window with a single optimization. You can't know how this mail was processed and it's fate. So, your tracking pixel and URL returned something useless to…

That’s not how Gmail works and it doesn’t protect your privacy that way:

https://blog.filippo.io/how-the-new-gmail-image-proxy-works-...

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#53

Post by CodeGlitch »

wahern wrote: post #9
pfundstein wrote: post #4

I can't think of any email clients that automatically download external images by default. The article seems to be over-blowing the issue a bit.

GMail displays them. It uses a proxy for downloading, but I don't think that matters unless they're preloading all images unconditionally upon server-side receipt of the message. Apple's macOS Mail.app client displays external images by default, as does their iOS app.

Stop using free email services?

Here's the one I use : https://protonmail.com/blog/how-big-tech-tracks-users/

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#54

Post by phreeza »

I used to be under the impression that the Gmail proxy protects you from this, but then I learned (on a different HN thread) that this is only partially true. It protects you from the sender harvesting the user agent etc, but it still only fetches the images when you open the email, so still leaks information. This promoted me to disable automatic image loading in gmail.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#55

Post by peteri »

j-james wrote: post #39

What's the history behind allowing external images in emails? Was it a size limitation? HTML emails already use only a subset of HTML, so I don't understand why it wasn't trimmed down more to only allow images as data URLs or encoded in Base64.

I suspect partly size but mostly tracking.

Images in email have been around since 1992 (RFC341 Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1341 ) and I don't remember when downloadable images got added to "text/richtext" but the concept of downloadable content is already there in section 7.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#58

Post by panic »

relix wrote: post #50

If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…

Does this mean I’ll be automatically unsubscribed from a mailing list if my mail client doesn’t load the tracking pixel? How long does this take to happen?

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#59

Post by wastholm »

What irks me is when email newsletters that I'm willfully subscribed to (the Economist comes to mind) inform me that "since I haven't been interacting" my subscription will be terminated. I have too been "interacting" (or as I call it, "reading") but my email client, very sensibly, doesn't load external resources, like pictures, willy nilly.

Re: Spy pixels in emails 'have become endemic'

#60

Post by phreack »

relix wrote: post #50

If you're running a mail newsletter, this tracking is pretty important. You're supposed to stop sending emails to someone who's not interacting with them, or you get an extra point towards being flagged as spam. Since people are already weary of clicking the unsubscribe link and instead casually mark everything as spam, every little bit towards keeping your reputation counts. It's a damned if you do, damned if you do…

One of the reasons I get weary of going through the unsubscribe route is that it's always a gray-on-white link incredibly hidden at the bottom of the email, like every single time. It's a miracle it's there at all. It'd be much simpler to have it at the top and actually visible by eyes instead, if you just want to keep engaged users on your list.
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