Privacy implications of email tracking [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Privacy implications of email tracking [pdf]

#71

Post by fjsolwmv » Fri, Sep 29, 2017, 9:06 PM UTC

eli wrote: post #22

rypskar wrote: post #10

It is a bit fun how some think they can track if I open emails from them or not. I have several times got email with something like "we see you are not reading the emails you get from us, so we will remove you from our list". I did read the emails using Thunderbird, so was only their tracking that didn't work. But this is maybe what we get when most read emails in web apps from companies that want to track everything…

Gmail actually takes steps to protect privacy when loading images. Apple's mail apps are the ones that load images indiscriminately. Pretty sure that's for UX reasons not ads.

Google takes some steps, but still reports opens back to senders.

Re: Privacy implications of email tracking [pdf]

#72

Post by patmcguire » Fri, Sep 29, 2017, 9:34 PM UTC

j_s wrote: post #63

oaeuntsh32nts wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that mean that if you even receive an email from a list, they get notified that you opened and read it, even if you didn't? If so, that seems bad to me.

No. From the link: > senders may be able to know whether you've opened an email that has an image attached to a unique link My limited understanding is that the load happens on first open, from Google's servers.

Yeah, without the ability to cookie them, which I guess is the gain from that.

Re: Privacy implications of email tracking [pdf]

#73

Post by jlgaddis » Sat, Sep 30, 2017, 1:13 AM UTC

nsomaru wrote: post #29

jlgaddis wrote: post #18

This is why I still love and use mutt (NeoMutt, technically) even after all these years. I occasionally do fire up Thunderbird but only for those extremely rare cases where I actually do need to be able to read an HTML e-mail.

Surely there's a way to pipe an html email to $BROWSER from [neo]mutt?

Yeah, as jasonjayr pointed out, and it's done automatically for pretty much every HTML e-mail I receive. Occasionally, however, due to formatting or whatever, I need to be able to view the actual HTML e-mail "as it was intended" (so I fire up Thunderbird).

Re: Privacy implications of email tracking [pdf]

#74

Post by eli » Mon, Oct 02, 2017, 5:29 PM UTC

oaeuntsh32nts wrote: post #58

eli wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gmail actually takes steps to protect privacy when loading images. Apple's mail apps are the ones that load images indiscriminately. Pretty sure that's for UX reasons not ads.

Not sure what you mean by, "Apple's mail apps are the ones that load images indiscriminately"? I've been using Apple's Mail.app for years on many different machines with many different accounts from different providers, and I have image loading turned off. I've never seen it load an image when I didn't ask it to. Furthermore, it sounds like Gmail will download all images from a mail and store them on Google's servers…

Sure, but most people never change any settings. By default it loads all images from all senders