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Images Now Showing in Gmail

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Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#21

Post by spb »

mjbraun wrote: post #7

I'm curious if this will help spammers. AFAIK, loading a tracking pixel helps validate an email address as active (since, by design, bounce messages probably wouldn't make it back to the spammer), even if the recipient didn't otherwise respond to the message. AFAIK, "Validated" email address lists are worth more than unchecked lists and if Google is preloading images for valid accounts, then that seems to make valida…

However, if they make requests (that they don't necessarily have to keep) for images for all accounts (preloading on receive and not read), it does the opposite, which is a good thing.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#22

Post by Anonymous98236 »

mjbraun wrote: post #7

I'm curious if this will help spammers. AFAIK, loading a tracking pixel helps validate an email address as active (since, by design, bounce messages probably wouldn't make it back to the spammer), even if the recipient didn't otherwise respond to the message. AFAIK, "Validated" email address lists are worth more than unchecked lists and if Google is preloading images for valid accounts, then that seems to make valida…

There's still an "Ask before displaying external images" setting, and based on the description in the article, it looks like images are only requested when the email is opened, not when it is delivered to the inbox. But, this new system looks to be enabled by default, so more people will have images enabled, which means the web bugs will mostly get through now.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#23

Post by rasengan »

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!).

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

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#24

Post by winslow »

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?

That was my initial reaction to. I suppose it has its pros and cons just like anything else. However, with recent Google (among other companies) and NSA dealings I'm looking at this with my cynical eyes as another data retention policy.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#25

Post by spb »

[deleted] wrote: post #17
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…

[deleted]

Actually, if they do it on delivery, it ruins the signal (since there is no longer any distinguishing factor between active accounts and inactive accounts), so the latter protects privacy more effectively.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#26

Post by eterm »

[deleted] wrote: post #17
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…

[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.com is received, which isn't information, it's an easy assumption.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#27

Post by valgaze »

GrinningFool wrote: post #8
Anonymous98236 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#29

Post by keithwinstein »

[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). Whether Google will alter the behavior when they actually deploy this feature, I don't know.]

[Original message:]

I just tested and, yes, Gmail only loaded the referenced image when I clicked on the message to open it within Gmail. I can't be sure, because perhaps if I had waited an hour without opening the message, Gmail would have automatically loaded the image anyway. But in reply to mherdeg below, the evidence suggests that, yes, Gmail plans to opt everybody in to sending "read receipts" by default for HTML messages that reference images.

I'm surprised by Google's statement that the previous behavior of prompting was "to protect you from unknown senders who might try to use images to compromise the security of your computer or mobile device."

I realize this was a benefit, but I always thought the main purpose was for privacy --- not to betray to the email sender when I opened the email. My guess is that Google did not view this as a privacy setting, or they probably would not have forcibly changed everybody's setting.

It's doubly strange that they did so without a notice inside Gmail that they did so -- just a blog post.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#30

Post by twoodfin »

cantfindmypass wrote: post #11
Anonymous98236 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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