Google Click Tracking in Gmail

By Michael Gray
In Google, SEO  

I can’t believe that I am the first one to notice this, and I guess it’s because I don’t use GMail regularly that I didn’t notice this before, but if they didn’t actually want your user data would Google be tracking clicks in Gmail?

That’s a screen shot of an email I sent to myself, when I click through here is the click stream data


https://mail.google.com/mail/channel/bind?at=4b6ae0a0280f09de-10f3b8639a9&VER=2&SID=FC9901F4395611D4&RID=80653&zx=ytvsuoe04m61&t=1

POST /mail/channel/bind?at=4b6ae0a0280f09de-10f3b8639a9&VER=2&SID=FC9901F4395611D4&RID=80653&zx=ytvsuoe04m61&t=1 HTTP/1.1
Host: mail.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Referer: https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=page&name=js&ver=qugj8tuc6og6
Content-Length: 36
Cookie: GX=DQAAAHQAAADIYjzYnE9SYKwF_YBJu_L84Plr6-8_IIurP_ykHMN37WWmxHhYQc1Y-PWZ4NqYDrL4l8ApzmskOAXEIHLxmCN89YMx6Q7gZ9s-ZgQNooeo8WlA5K4tRjT4DP7zgG7t4lymzFmzPZ8Pe5emrjKkJE_RW5Ycg2Y8GzXSVt95_0saXw; GMAIL_AT=4b6ae0a0280f09de-10f3b8639a9; gmailchat=thegraywolf@gmail.com/588825; GMAIL_LOGIN=1164934768843/1164934768843/1164934789203/1164934791625/1164934792640/1164934799031/1164934801578/false/false; PREF=ID=a231e6c938c534ab:TM=1164934800:LM=1164934800:GM=1:S=Y1Sb_CWSXX1YXi0l; TZ=300; GMAIL_RTT=265; GMAIL_LOGIN=T1164934768843/1164934768843/1164934789203; SID=DQAAAHMAAACoPmKx41fYFUGmPfMrnOr7tzO1oIua3b1ayP8vkrOwBoMWSvEFpAm9aI315Pff9QuU1Q2XqS8q-DfpaCkc5I2csaQ2CNS_2XqGvsZdO_k9OyXCRkgT41dlFYViqq5zl4a9CAs6cK1nupD7HzzqU-NWLrR26R-TiMnLae0k5f4nTg; GMAIL_HELP=hosted:0; S=gmail=QWq0Eky_YuXQ5a11mDESEg:gmail_yj=SYBt4Cnf9o8biPmZGkSyYQ:gmproxy=_AskRgXPzwY:gmproxy_yj=qT84QUU_k6Q:gmproxy_yj_sub=QhgIhKsdU9E
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
count=1&req0_type=cf&req0_focused=1&
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 26
Set-Cookie: S=gmail=QWq0Eky_YuXQ5a11mDESEg:gmail_yj=WdBdYynrC_RQc_Sm2ShL-g:gmproxy=m1kJbD_3qpk:gmproxy_yj=qT84QUU_k6Q:gmproxy_yj_sub=OB-PHQ63h6c; Domain=.google.com; Path=/
Server: GFE/1.3
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:05:34 GMT
----------------------------------------------------------
https://mail.google.com/mail/channel/bind?at=4b6ae0a0280f09de-10f3b8639a9&VER=2&SID=FC9901F4395611D4&RID=80654&zx=y2zzlxyna8e1&t=1

POST /mail/channel/bind?at=4b6ae0a0280f09de-10f3b8639a9&VER=2&SID=FC9901F4395611D4&RID=80654&zx=y2zzlxyna8e1&t=1 HTTP/1.1
Host: mail.google.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0
Accept: text/xml,application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Connection: keep-alive
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Referer: https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=page&name=js&ver=qugj8tuc6og6
Content-Length: 36
Cookie: GX=DQAAAHQAAADIYjzYnE9SYKwF_YBJu_L84Plr6-8_IIurP_ykHMN37WWmxHhYQc1Y-PWZ4NqYDrL4l8ApzmskOAXEIHLxmCN89YMx6Q7gZ9s-ZgQNooeo8WlA5K4tRjT4DP7zgG7t4lymzFmzPZ8Pe5emrjKkJE_RW5Ycg2Y8GzXSVt95_0saXw; GMAIL_AT=4b6ae0a0280f09de-10f3b8639a9; gmailchat=thegraywolf@gmail.com/588825; GMAIL_LOGIN=1164934768843/1164934768843/1164934789203/1164934791625/1164934792640/1164934799031/1164934801578/false/false; PREF=ID=a231e6c938c534ab:TM=1164934800:LM=1164934800:GM=1:S=Y1Sb_CWSXX1YXi0l; TZ=300; GMAIL_RTT=265; GMAIL_LOGIN=T1164934768843/1164934768843/1164934789203; SID=DQAAAHMAAACoPmKx41fYFUGmPfMrnOr7tzO1oIua3b1ayP8vkrOwBoMWSvEFpAm9aI315Pff9QuU1Q2XqS8q-DfpaCkc5I2csaQ2CNS_2XqGvsZdO_k9OyXCRkgT41dlFYViqq5zl4a9CAs6cK1nupD7HzzqU-NWLrR26R-TiMnLae0k5f4nTg; GMAIL_HELP=hosted:0; S=gmail=QWq0Eky_YuXQ5a11mDESEg:gmail_yj=WdBdYynrC_RQc_Sm2ShL-g:gmproxy=m1kJbD_3qpk:gmproxy_yj=qT84QUU_k6Q:gmproxy_yj_sub=OB-PHQ63h6c
Pragma: no-cache
Cache-Control: no-cache
count=1&req0_type=cf&req0_focused=0&
HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Cache-Control: no-cache
Pragma: no-cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 26
Set-Cookie: S=gmail=QWq0Eky_YuXQ5a11mDESEg:gmail_yj=sz3Qug6yIiRCbmeEgCDRMA:gmproxy=9dR9EQviaws:gmproxy_yj=qT84QUU_k6Q:gmproxy_yj_sub=riU6NxfKQZo; Domain=.google.com; Path=/
Server: GFE/1.3
Date: Fri, 01 Dec 2006 01:05:37 GMT
----------------------------------------------------------


I mean really how does it benefit me the user by sending me through Google first? I caught this behavior last night when I was using a proxy. The problem was Google threw up some wonka-doodle 500 error everytime I went through the proxy. I clicked a link in an email that was not going to Google, forgot to turn the proxy off and Google choked on it. Now what’s really clever about the whole thing is anytime you click a purchase confirmation email from a store Google knows about it even if you don’t have the toolbar installed and the merchant isn’t using any of the Google services. Pretty sneaky those boys.

Ok for you incredibly inquisitive folks who are saying hey Gray what the heck are the 1800 emails in your inbox? I’m using the wordpress database backup plugin which every night send a backup of all of my core wordpress tables and any other tables to my gmail account. It’s kind of like a free off site backup.

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