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Images Now Showing in Gmail

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Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#31

Post by lukeschlather »

Ricapar wrote: post #9

I kinda like this. More often than not, I never click the "Display Images" link because I know doing so will essentially feed information back to the people who sent the email (the fact that I opened it, my geoIP location, browser, etc). I've been fine with a slightly degraded and less pretty email experience in order to give me some extra privacy and keep my information out of marketer's systems. With this I guess I…

This just means they'll be paying Google for that info instead of being able to gather it themselves.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#32

Post by runn1ng »

steven2012 wrote: post #4

I hate to be "that guy", but does this mean Google is storing every one of our pics on their proxy servers? For how long do they store them, and what is their data retention policy? Also, remembering that Google has no obligation to protect non-American users, does that give the NSA access to them, to run things like facial recognition, etc?

Ummmm.... they already store all your e-mail. What difference does storing images make?

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#33

Post by danielnr »

keithwinstein wrote: post #29

[Update 2: I just tested with a newly-created Gmail account and the feature did not seem to have been rolled out to the new account yet.] [Update: I'm not sure when this feature will actually be rolled out. I think my test below automatically displayed the image because my own email address appears to be implicitly a whitelisted sender (even though "images from this sender are always displayed" doesn't appear for it)…

I just ran the same test and can confirm the results. Google will only load your image if you open the email, which means Google has just opted-in all users to mail receipts.

I don't use any Google services outside of small tests like this, but it still makes me concerned for how this will affect the privacy of people I know.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#34

Post by GrinningFool »

Anonymous98236 wrote: post #13
GrinningFool wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#35

Post by arsenerei »

steven2012 wrote: post #4

I hate to be "that guy", but does this mean Google is storing every one of our pics on their proxy servers? For how long do they store them, and what is their data retention policy? Also, remembering that Google has no obligation to protect non-American users, does that give the NSA access to them, to run things like facial recognition, etc?

Honest question: Does this differ from them storing the email which already contains the pictures?

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#36

Post by swedegeek »

Yea, it's hard to not think this is ultimately not a great move. It seems rather shortsighted from a Gmail user's perspective if Google can't address concerns over spammers being able to verify email addresses, or even just analytic trackers. It is also vastly less appealing to hear that Google plans to cache all images, which we know Big Brother is grabbing as well. And in the case where someone may want to actually see images for a marketing email (albeit, extremely rare for me), it actually hamstrings the source of the email from possibly providing customized images/content based on geolocation/browser/etc. that I could be interested in seeing.

So, what's the upside vs. just having the option to display images as desired and NOT have Google cache them?

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#37

Post by m_ram »

herge wrote: post #18
rasengan wrote: post #10

This is a step in the right direction. However, please understand that it doesn't really make a difference in forms of real privacy Googlers! The e-mail spam/list creators are a different kind of adversary than, for example, web trackers. They will do something like this: http www theirimageserver com/images/img53.jpg?to=you@email.com (Obviously they will obfuscate and use some kind of hash instead of cleartext e-mai…

They can mitigate that by downloading all images that come to any address @gmail.com. That way spammers won't know if you@gmail.com is real or not, and still be at step 0 (and hopefully taking some bandwidth/processing time/log space from the spammer at the same time!).

This is probably obvious to people who do email marketing, but I just tested whether gmail bounces bad addresses. They do bounce addresses that have never been registered and addresses that have been deleted. This means that even before this change, spammers could find out if an address is active.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#39

Post by rasengan »

rasengan wrote: post #23
herge wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can mitigate that by downloading all images that come to any address @gmail.com. That way spammers won't know if you@gmail.com is real or not, and still be at step 0 (and hopefully taking some bandwidth/processing time/log space from the spammer at the same time!).

That is very true. Hopefully, that's what is going on!

I just tried it. It loads the image on e-mail LOAD. Not prefetched. This is a privacy problem.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#40

Post by rasengan »

eterm wrote: post #26
[deleted] wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

You've got that backward. If google fires off a request when you open the email, the companies can track whether you opened the email. If google fires off a request when they get the email, the company has no way to track if you opened their email. If google fires off requests to all emails they receive to @gmail.com then the marketers won't even know if it's active @gmail.com account, they'll just know that *@gmail.…

I just tried it. It loads the image on e-mail LOAD. Not prefetched. This is a privacy problem.
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