Gmail for android silently overwrites links in your emails, so it can track what you open
I clicked on a link inside an email from a privacy service, and was surprised to see they used google tracking for their stuff, so I opened it in thunderbird and behold, it had no tracking.
But the worst part is… if I went back again and long pressed the link on gmail, it showed the link preview, WITHOUT the tracking. There’s some kind of rule, so try it first on a new, unopened email, without long clicking. You’ll need something to intercept it because the browser will just redirect to the main link.
Imagine the mailman looking at you, noting down which letters you open, it’s crazy.
I noticed this thanks to link eye, an app that intercept all browser links and shows a list of supported apps, so you can redirect to the preferred one. It also displays the link, it’s abandoned but still working.
I’m 99% sure I have all the privacy stuff set correctly. I suppose it may also happen on desktop/ios, but I have no way to check it
Also fedia is not showing me a field to set the post title, so I’m sorry if everything ends up in the title or if the title is empty
Absolutely everything is tracked in Gmail. Spend an extra second hovering over the send button for Sara’s email and it will be in their data model for you. That’s the whole point of Gmail for them.
Even without redirect links, it would be entirely possible to use other app mechanisms to track which links are clicked.
Ha, clicking links, like, with a mouse? https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/vimium-c/
Outlook does this, too. All in the name of security, of course.
Can confirm.
Yeah, their financial security, and no one else’s anything.
It’s not just their mobile app. Gmail on desktop browsers (firefox) does something similar. You can see it in your “history” after clicking a link.
Thanks for the reminder to ditch it for Thunderbird!
Like they’re not just tracking it in the browser and OS anyway.
@Blackmist@feddit.uk - I have heard people make comments on the same lines before. Generally my response is - “oh, so that makes it ok?”
But I want to do better. Could you please help me understand what’s the underlying point you were trying to make? Thank you!-
gmail does this in general. whats really annoying is you can use the browser copy clean link and im not sure if they are not following standards or what but you still get the google encapsulated link.
That useless “feature” has never worked for me, I think literally once. I use my own AutoHotkey link-cleaning script that I have yet to find out how to port over to Linux.
I should do something like that but im lazy and just mannually delete the begininig part.
Does the same thing from gsheets. Cracks me up seeing it try to track an Aspera ssh tunnel that’s literally only accessible from one IP.
Do K9 or thunderbird mail on Android do this? (even if you use gmail as backend?)
No, only the official google clients do link hijacking. Thunderbird doesn’t do it.
