<story><title>Images Now Showing in Gmail</title><url>http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alooPotato</author><text>This proxying actually rolled out on December 3rd to most gmail.com users. We, Streak, happenned to launch an email tracking feature on the same day (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.streak.com/email-tracking-in-gmail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.streak.com&amp;#x2F;email-tracking-in-gmail&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s what we&amp;#x27;ve learned:&lt;p&gt;- the proxying of requests only happens when a user is viewing the mail inside Gmail (i.e. gmail does not actually affect the message body, its just proxying at render time)&lt;p&gt;- gmail only caches in the image for a few minutes. So for email marketers, if your recipient views the email then views it again a few hours later, the marketer will see two requests for the image&lt;p&gt;- there is basically no personally identifiable information in the request that Google&amp;#x27;s proxy sends to the server hosting the image. So from that perspective this is actually a boost in privacy than the previous state of the world. None of the headers, cache controls, cookies, ip addresses, referrers or user agents are passed to the original image server&lt;p&gt;- obviously you can encode some ID into the image URL itself but all that lets you do is identify the email address of the user that opened the email. But you already had their email address because you sent them an email - so again, no PII gets disclosed&lt;p&gt;- it is true that marketers will see a more accurate count of opens (because displaying images is on by default)&lt;p&gt;- there seems to be several ways to get gmail&amp;#x27;s proxy to NOT cache the image and simply proxy the request every time the user opens the emails</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>chimeracoder</author><text>&amp;gt; - obviously you can encode some ID into the image URL itself but all that lets you do is identify the email address of the user that opened the email. But you already had their email address because you sent them an email - so again, no PII gets disclosed&lt;p&gt;This functions as a read receipt (like the tracking pixels).&lt;p&gt;The image might be cached later, but since it is &lt;i&gt;initially&lt;/i&gt; loaded the first time an email with it is is opened, this means that implementing read receipts on all outgoing emails is as simple as making the URL for each image unique to the user.&lt;p&gt;Thus, the marketer knows:&lt;p&gt;1) That the email was opened
2) When the email was opened&lt;p&gt;along with whatever information they already have about the user.&lt;p&gt;This is a HUGE privacy implication. Even if &amp;quot;no [further] PII gets disclosed&amp;quot;, it discloses a lot of information that is both sensitive and easy for marketers to join with existing identifying information.</text></comment>
<story><title>Images Now Showing in Gmail</title><url>http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>alooPotato</author><text>This proxying actually rolled out on December 3rd to most gmail.com users. We, Streak, happenned to launch an email tracking feature on the same day (&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.streak.com/email-tracking-in-gmail&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.streak.com&amp;#x2F;email-tracking-in-gmail&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;s what we&amp;#x27;ve learned:&lt;p&gt;- the proxying of requests only happens when a user is viewing the mail inside Gmail (i.e. gmail does not actually affect the message body, its just proxying at render time)&lt;p&gt;- gmail only caches in the image for a few minutes. So for email marketers, if your recipient views the email then views it again a few hours later, the marketer will see two requests for the image&lt;p&gt;- there is basically no personally identifiable information in the request that Google&amp;#x27;s proxy sends to the server hosting the image. So from that perspective this is actually a boost in privacy than the previous state of the world. None of the headers, cache controls, cookies, ip addresses, referrers or user agents are passed to the original image server&lt;p&gt;- obviously you can encode some ID into the image URL itself but all that lets you do is identify the email address of the user that opened the email. But you already had their email address because you sent them an email - so again, no PII gets disclosed&lt;p&gt;- it is true that marketers will see a more accurate count of opens (because displaying images is on by default)&lt;p&gt;- there seems to be several ways to get gmail&amp;#x27;s proxy to NOT cache the image and simply proxy the request every time the user opens the emails</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PavlovsCat</author><text>&amp;gt; all that lets you do is identify the email address of the user that opened the email. But you already had their email address because you sent them an email&lt;p&gt;You just have &lt;i&gt;an&lt;/i&gt; email address. Once that image is downloaded, you know it&amp;#x27;s active the sky basically falls down.</text></comment>