When you take a look at the following screenshot of an email recieved and take a closer look at the links inside the email, it looks like a regular email with normal links inside it.
Now observe what their sneaky onclick URL rewrite function does … (it’s only visible for a few milliseconds)
Everytime you click on a URL in Gmail, it’s tracked!
The interesting thing about Google Chrome is, they never show this redirection link which makes me wonder, is this type of tracking functionality built into Chrome or are they simply using Chrome to cover their tracks? The fact that it autoupdates means it is sending information back and forth to Google the whole time, what is stopping them from sending tracking information back and forth?
Think it is time to analyze exactly what is being sent back and forth between Chrome and Google, Google tracking my links is already a violation of privacy!
That sucks. And I find it even harder to move from gmail. I am trying but updating all accounts takes hours of logging in at places and changing it.
The way I see it, the only way Andy Burnham can get his way with internet filtering is by making use of the big internet giants, disabling links / sites via ISPs is a lot of work, getting Google, Yahoo and MSN to simply disable links from within their mail clients is easy and might even be the first step towards internet filtering.
As soon as I get my new dedicated server, I’m going to setup a proper mail server and discontinue using my gmail account.
Well, my question is what google does not track lately? lol
I guess they want you to make a trade-off between convenience and privacy?
It’s been doing that for years – pretty much ever since Gmail was still GoogleMail.
But seriously – what’s the big problem? It’s not as if Google employs hundreds of thousands of people to sit and watch what you do online every day. It’s all part of their automated quasi-AI that only acts to serve more relevant search results and context ads.
A little bit more transparency would be welcome … just as much as I dislike keyloggers or other trojan horses tracking what I do, that much I dislike the idea of Google tracking my every movement, they might say they use it to serve relevant ads, but they can take that back anytime and change their policy without letting anyone know.
Doesn’t it do the same thing when you click on a Google result?
My next question is… so? If they only use the tracking information to improve my service or for purely statistical purposes, if at all, what’s the problem?
When you’re clicking on a Google result, they’re tracking what ads you’ve clicked on in order to bill the person who’s ad it is.
Regarding the Google tracking system, they could effectively be screwing with other tracking systems like AWeber for which people pay to get tracking results from, at least with AWeber you can see it’s an aweber.com link being used to track which you’ve clicked on, with GMail, they don’t even disclose that they’re tracking the links you click on and I also don’t see an option to opt out.
The problem is, I don’t have the option to opt out which makes them just as bad as trojan horses with regards to tracking links without asking permission.
Maybe they’ve added it in the disclaimer recently, there was nothing about it when I initially signed up.
Hello. Great job. I did not expect this on a Wednesday. This is a great story. Thanks!