Slashdot Mirror
Google Makes It Harder For Marketers To Collect User Data
cagraham writes "In a seemingly minor update, Google announced that all Gmail images will now be cached on their own servers, before being displayed to users. This means that users won't have to click to download images in every email now — they'll just automatically be shown. For marketers, however, the change has serious implications. Because each user won't download the images from a third-party server, marketers won't be able to see open-rates, log IP addresses, or gather information on user location and browser type. Google says the changes are intended to enhance user privacy and security."
Multiple tests by multiple individuals have shown that they do NOT honor any of the various no-cache headers.
Tracking unique users is still easy (using a unique URL) - but tracking how many times they opened the email, or where they opened it from (IP address) or on what platform is now lost.
If I were google, I would download images in all incoming messages regardless if they are intended for real email boxes or not. This would let them know which websites are being used for spam. The spam detector could use this information by pattern matching every image (regardless of relabling or website copying), and mark spam accordingly.
This.
I work for an email marketing company. Since our customers are very keen on not being mixed in with spam, we (and I think I speak for most of our competitors in this respect) take care to ensure only legit (confirmed double opt-in) email accounts are listed, to keep our servers' reputation perfect. Understand that it is in the best interest of legit senders to make customers WANT to recieve their emails. Open images and the statistics they create are primarily used to fine-tune the emails sent.
These open pixel images have practically no value to spammers (hence very few spammers actually use them); sending out spam over botnets, they don't care if an email address exists. They might care if a batch of several thousand email addresses no longer exists, but tracking and logging individual recipients... that's damn expensive if you're sending to millions of email addresses.
This cache won't hurt spammers.
It hurts companies you have subscribed to receive email messages (I sure hope you trust the average Hotmail user's taste, since emails will change to suit their needs).
And I dare bet that pretty soon, Google will start selling this information, and then everybody will be hurt.