This helps in that you don't connect directly to the image so it doesn't leak your IP and other info that would be available from the connection.
Marketing emails still send unique URLs for each recipient so they can associate your email address with opening any images and links. Google's proxy doesn't remedy this.
As far as I know, Gmail doesn't load the images until the first time the user opens the message, so it unfortunately doesn't make the tracking as useless as you could hope.
Technically it loads all images through a Google proxy[0] which in theory prevents third parties from using images for tracking. The third parties only get a 'hit' when Google pulls the image into their cache, which is not when you open the mail.
Google can still track you, but if you really care about that then you're probably not using Gmail anyway.
Comments
And except gmail's web interface, which is one of the biggest email clients these days.
Gmail made changes years ago to proxy images to prevent leaking info like this.
https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html
This helps in that you don't connect directly to the image so it doesn't leak your IP and other info that would be available from the connection.
Marketing emails still send unique URLs for each recipient so they can associate your email address with opening any images and links. Google's proxy doesn't remedy this.
Won't the image proxy make it look like all emails to Gmail addresses are always opened, essentially making the tracking useless?
As far as I know, Gmail doesn't load the images until the first time the user opens the message, so it unfortunately doesn't make the tracking as useless as you could hope.
Gmail's web interface does load images by default.
It does not load them from 3rd parties. It cached them and loads them from Google's servers. Open your network tab and see
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/gmail...
This protects your IP address and user agent string from being read by the sender, but otherwise doesn't change anything
Technically it loads all images through a Google proxy[0] which in theory prevents third parties from using images for tracking. The third parties only get a 'hit' when Google pulls the image into their cache, which is not when you open the mail.
Google can still track you, but if you really care about that then you're probably not using Gmail anyway.
[0]: https://gmail.googleblog.com/2013/12/images-now-showing.html
Gmail won't load remote images when you open the mail. It will load images from Google servers that have been cached.
it doesn't pre-cache them, Google requests them in real-time when you view them