Not quite. According to testers in the other thread[1], Google pulls images on mail open. This means marketers will get more accurate email open stats because now the default behavior is to load images. However, they don't get cookies, IP, etc so they lose some of that capability. Not all bad for marketers and spammers.

I tried to opt-out of external content in Settings > General but unfortunately it's still loading images.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6895606