Gmail users today were greeted with a banner announcing “Images Now Showing”. Yes, Google turned images on by default in Gmail, even if that was not how you had your settings. Because Google, perhaps taking a move from the Facebook playbook, has decided that they know better than you what you want. The reason it is safe, they explain, is that they are now caching the images for you on their Gmail image proxy server, making sure that the image is safe and not virus-infested before serving it to you.