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Images Now Showing in Gmail

gmailblog.blogspot.com

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Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#51

Post by steven2012 »

arsenerei wrote: post #35
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?

To me, it sounds like they did all the heavy lifting for the NSA, and then packaged it up as a "feature" for us. If Google handed over the emails themselves to the NSA, it would contain a lot more noise, but now it's really simple for the NSA.

The work is obviously to sift through all the emails, remove the photos, and separate/store them on a separate server. Now all NSA needs to do is get a daily dump of all the pics, and then run their data collection/facial recognition on them.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#52

Post by natch »

Seems it's being rolled out in a sloppy fashion. In my Gmail account, images in email have suddenly stopped working. There is still a "display images" button, and when I click it, the images do not load. When I attempt to open an image link from the email message in another tab, I get a 404 error on Google's proxy server, with a super long URL.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#53

Post by anonsumus »

finnh wrote: post #45
anonsumus wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think you quite understand the changes here, no "read receipts" are sent, any analytics sent only point to the Google proxy processing the images, no individual recipients nor their actions are revealed. See how marketers are scrambling to adjust to this change: a.) Gmail is now requesting all images from proxy servers (googleusercontent.com), which incorrectly situates users in its headquarters in Mountain V…

OP was using "read receipts" colloquially, to include "tracking images with a unique code embedded in them". And, as such, OP's claims are exactly correct. The only way this would not be true is if GMail pulled every image in every email, even if it's not read by the recipient. Given GMail's usage of the term "proxy server" in their blog post, as well as the tests by the OP and others on this thread, this appears not…

Gmail seems to be proxying the images through: https://ci5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/ and my understating the polling happens when Google receives the email not when it's opened.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#54

Post by nkoren »

finnh wrote: post #44
danielnr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors. On the flip side, those same solutions can no longer set a persistent cookie with the image, so persistent tracking based on the initial email open will stop working.

> "Email open" tracking just got a lot more reliable for all mass email & marketing automation vendors.

Has it? If Google's proxy is caching images, then "email open" tracking might have broken entirely. All the sender would see is that their email has been opened once by the proxy -- for all gmail addresses put together.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#55

Post by natch »

draz wrote: post #2

How does this affect invisible pixels (for analytics)?

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.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#56

Post by macspoofing »

tehwebguy wrote: post #38

Protect me from images? That is not why I used this feature. I used it so that images like /verifyRealEmail.php?email=$myaddress wouldn't work.

If the gmail proxy caches every image that is sent to a gmail address, then this bad for spammers, and good for everyone else. That's one less mechanism to verify valid (or active) email address.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#57

Post by [deleted] »

runn1ng wrote: post #32
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?

[deleted]

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#58

Post by shabble »

runn1ng wrote: post #32
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?

Because if you stop serving up the remote reference before it gets requested by a particular client, it won't be there.

If it's archived {immediately,on first request} permanently thereafter, there's now another copy outwith your control.

Edit: moreover, the images are requested locally by the user's browser. Google doesn't get a look at them at any point[1]. Whereas now, they get a permanent copy for free, because they're doing you such a favour!

[1] Directly, anyway. I guess they could use js to get the requests and headers and submit them back to the mothership, but on slow connections that could be pretty obvious.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#59

Post by ToastyMallows »

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)…

> Update: I'm not sure when this feature will actually be rolled out.

FTA: This new improvement will be rolling out on desktop starting today and to your Gmail mobile apps in early 2014.

Re: Images Now Showing in Gmail

#60

Post by herge »

m_ram wrote: post #37
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!).

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.

Bouncing badly typed addresses is more useful for users than stymieing spammers. However, a spammer doesn't need to know if an existing gmail address is being actively used or not.
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