I work remotely, so like 99% of communication is with email. With my email (gmail) settings, I have it set so that the email must always “Ask before displaying external images”; so, once I open an email someone sends me, no images are allowed to load automatically unless I tell it to. Whenever someone does send an image, a box pops up that says “Images are not displayed,” and then it gives me an option to display the image if I want to see it.
Usually when this happens, I'll tell it to load, and the image is just a graph or something. But sometimes, I'll click “display/load image,” and it'll SAY that it's loaded the image, but I don't see anything. So it's like, gmail is telling me that it blocked an image, but once I allow it to load, it's not there?
Are these invisible tracking pixels, or am I missing something? The idea bugs the hell out of me. It's intrusive. If they are tracking pixels, is it sufficient to just have gmail block image loading, or should I also take other measures to block the pixels?