holy smokes google is going to further grow their monopoly and try to take over the advertising market with this.
They'll cache and own even more of your data and keep it out of the hands of spammers - in turn spammers will have to buy into google to get data about you.
This isn't for us, this was done to make money off of us.
Google is a corporation. Everything they do is to make money.
The images they're caching aren't mine, anyway, and in many cases they're unsolicited. Sure there's the evil aspect to this (they own advertising), but there is the potential good of obfuscating your actually private data - the IP you check your mail from, when you check it, anything you send back with an HTTP request - from marketers. On solely that note, I'm all for it. But I'm also one of those who like the new Tabs setup, and rarely loaded images for emails from people I don't know.
But in many cases they are solicited, and people want the behavior that gets triggered by knowing about opens:
You always opens our offer e-mails? We'll send you more of the same of what you open, and less of what you don't, increasing the chance you'll find something you like.
Stopping web-bugs from the spammers will improved things, but stopping it from legitimate opt-in marketing mails will make the experience worse and less targeted for people.
The company I work for send millions of e-mails on behalf of customers. All opt-in, and I spend far more time than I'd like making sure we comply with all expectations of the mail providers and ISPs...
But I'm all for Google proxying and hiding IP, cookies etc - I wrote a webmail solution back in the day, and co-founded a company to run it, and frankly I pretty much assumed Google did this already; we did that back in '99 because it was the obvious thing to do.
While this will, indeed, take away some information from email marketers, it may also give them more, different information. Now, instead of getting a lot of personally identifiable information from some users (some=the percentage which still used clients that don't block image requests), they will probably get less information, but from a wider set of users - those who use the default settings in Gmail.
On the one hand, their proxy solution has a positive effect for privacy, but on the other hand, the load-by-default setting has a negative effect.
Either way, Google already knows which e-mails you're opening, so using an image proxy is not going to give them "even more of your data" that they didn't already have.
> keep it out of the hands of spammers - in turn spammers will have to buy into google to get data about you.
Again, that's what I want. Spammers depend upon an incredibly low cost of sending emails with almost no accountability through botnets and foreign servers. If they need to open Google advertising accounts, provide a credit number, have to get their ads approved, and get charged market rates for their impressions ... I'm all for it.
But none of them will actually do it. Google won't make a dime from them.
They'll cache and own even more of your data and keep it out of the hands of spammers - in turn spammers will have to buy into google to get data about you.
This isn't for us, this was done to make money off of us.