12 ms·

Superhuman: Read Statuses

169 points by DVassallo 7y ago

minimaxir 7y ago
Discussion yesterday of controversy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336762 Highly visible blog posts are indeed the best way of effecting change, although the investors who were criticizing the original article now look very silly.
- lanrh1836 7y ago
  Yes, not even a few hours ago a VC at Founders Fund tweeted “...there's a strong correlation between the people outraged by privacy and the people that I think are dumbasses in the valley.” Source: https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1146430814374117376?s=21 https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1146430814374117376?s=21
  - hadsed 7y ago
    Amazing to find a VC who not only isn't concerned but actively derides concerns around privacy. Maybe he has a terrible personal opinion (in my opinion), but this seems like a poor perspective from someone who should be worrying about existential threats to companies. Someone should tell the US Senate that "capitalism baby" is an appropriate response to privacy violations!
  - M2Ys4U 7y ago
    Good to know that Founders Fund thinks human rights are stupid, and therefore should be avoided at all costs.
lanrh1836 7y ago
Now the CEO is getting praised on Twitter but this doesn’t address the main complaint which is the read status itself. Yes, location made it worse, but that data was mostly bunk anyway because Gmail (and probably others) will show the location of the Gmail server and not the user themselves.
- aiddun 7y ago
  You can still get location data from any email on an external mail client (mail.app, Mail app, etc with images loaded). Gmail only proxies images in the browser client (and maybe the the mobile app?).
- kasey_junk 7y ago
  It does address it. He specifically says that it is table stakes for his software and that they are leaving it in. You may not like that but it is addressed. Personally I like that response, though I think they have legal problems in some jurisdictions. They didn’t try to weasel word their way out.
hashkb 7y ago
It's tracking without consent, plain and simple. Forcing users to choose between HTML email and being tracked is nefarious. Users by default do not assume they're being tracked. Just like unsub, highly visible opt out of tracking should be the law. Morally there's no question.
harryh 7y ago
"Recipients of emails cannot opt out....I would love to find better technology to solve this problem." How about...put a notification of tracking in emails that contain it rather than making it invisible and then include an opt out link? That seems....not hard.
- crispinb 7y ago
  Honesty? This is tech. This is business. You're speaking a foreign language to both.
- derefr 7y ago
  That allows you to opt out only after having had your first open tracked. Presumably a technological solution would allow the client to opt out of even that first pixel (hopefully while not having to opt out of displaying non-tracking images.)
  - harryh 7y ago
    Ya, that makes my proposal imperfect, however I contend that it would be a huge improvement over the status quo.
    - mikeash 7y ago
      How about you include an opt in link? If the service is so valuable then this should be fine.
  - kylec 7y ago
    Maybe Superhuman could delete the tracking info it gathered when you opt-out
    - bigiain 7y ago
      And we should 100% trust them to do that, because they've demonstrated responsible stewardship of user data so far. Or not.
- 7y ago
lrpublic 7y ago
Surely this a massive breach of GDPR ?
- harryh 7y ago
  IANAL but this discussion of the topic seems to indicate that you are correct if any SuperHuman users send emails with invisible tracking pixels to anyone in the EU. https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/email-tracking/ https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/email-tracking/
- kasey_junk 7y ago
  ‘Massive’? I’d be surprised if they have anywhere near the incidents of tracking pixels that a bog standard small ad network has. No one will be able to tell accurately until a ruling comes down but I believe this is a gdpr violation but one they won’t be fined for if they do basic location filtering for their tracking pixels.
  - lrpublic 7y ago
    I was thinking, massive is the sense that any (business) user of the service might be considered in breach of GDPR for obtaining personal datan without consent.
  - talaketu 7y ago
    A "bog standard small ad network" does not typically have the email address of the ad viewer.
tsieling 7y ago
When these things happen, to me the more important thing is what will leadership do to change the thinking that led to the problem. Issuing a patch is a solid step, but it's a symptom that points to a need for change in how features are vetted and thought through.
ocdtrekkie 7y ago
Honestly: This was... pretty fast, the response is not just a statement of belief, but a clear list of changes they intend to implement quickly, and I really have no major complaints about how they've handled this. If someone wants to use tracking pixels, they'll find software that does it, so I'm really okay with them keeping the feature in... with the removed location information. (I am going to block it anyways, let's be honest.) And most importantly, they recognized the power of defaults for setting how people tend to behave. Making the feature non-default will crater it's use percentage across their customer base.
- bigiain 7y ago
  > the response is not just a statement of belief, but a clear list of changes they intend to implement Sure. But it's also an indication of what their team thought "this is fine!" about, before an internet shitstorm rained down upon them. In my mind they're always to be suspected of being either naive or actively evil in their use of personal data. Anybody who launches "a powerful business tool", and then later tells us "We did not consider potential bad actors. I wholeheartedly apologize for not thinking through this more fully." is not someone I'd want running _my_ business tools. I'm now wondering if they considered "bad actors" finding their open MongoDB databases on Shodan? Or their public S3 buckets with their backups? Or their production API keys and secrets in their pubic GitHub code? Or all those other mistakes that everybody goes "but nobody except idiots would do that!" and yet we read about it multiple times per week anyway... Maybe these guys have a great Email tool. I strongly doubt they have an entrenched culture of "considering bad actors" and appropriately investing effort and securing all the non customer facing infrastructure...
  - ocdtrekkie 7y ago
    To be honest, I would suspect a large percentage of tech startups had failed to consider bad actors until the last year or two. Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect, but I've seen far too many companies respond to controversy with how they care and will think about how to make things better, while not making any significant changes at all. This is a big step above that.
wmab 7y ago
I don't think Superhuman should have caved to this criticism as quickly as they did. Good that they kept the feature, albeit dumbed down. People pay for a power user email client because it's exactly that - a power user tool, which should be fully featured. If you remove read receipts then there are a whole host of other email clients that will gladly give you that feature (bye-bye revenue). Is someone going to write a Medium post calling out each of these companies too? There is also a bunch of companies that aren't primarily email clients - like CRMs (Pipedrive etc) that offer this feature out the box, as it's exceptionally useful for sales teams. If there really was such mass hysteria regarding read receipts in emails (WhatsApp has it by default too?) then it should be your email provider that should be leaned on to secure their system. Google has known for a very long time about this, and has changed the loading of images to stop location tracking, presumably the only thing they actually think is controversial with read receipts.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Read receipts for email are the worst. Groupwise shops used to often have an awful culture about waiting on/complaining about when mail was opened.
sterlind 7y ago
Shot in the dark, but could tracking pixels fall afoul of wiretapping laws? It's a single bit of information, but it is a 1-bit recording gathered without the other party's consent.
- kasey_junk 7y ago
  Tracking pixels have been a normal part of the email ecosystem for more than 20 years. If an esoteric use of the law was going to stop it it would be done by now.
  - netik 7y ago
    This is basically what GDPR is designed to stop.
    - kasey_junk 7y ago
      That’s not reusing old law, that’s a law designed purposely to stop this.
  - inetknght 7y ago
    Tracking pixels have been complained about for a long time too. There are actual real people who have actual real physical problems with being tracked and their law says they have freedom to privacy but it's normally violated.
  - nerdponx 7y ago
    We should leave Jim Crow voting laws in place because they have been a normal part of the electoral system for 150 years.
- 6d6b73 7y ago
  That single bit carries a lot of potential information with it: - location - time when the person is active i.e does the victim use computer at 11pm? - mail client used - potential to connect user with other services using ip/MUA tracking
kixiQu 7y ago
I didn't expect this, but it's actually everything I would have reasonably wanted from them. Dang!
danShumway 7y ago
Put me in the camp that this is not out of the ordinary for what most marketing emails are already doing. Also put me in the camp that it's unacceptable. My takeaway is that Superhuman is a scuzzy company that I want nothing to do with, but my takeaway is also that Superhuman backing down doesn't really solve the problem. Everybody does this -- and I don't care if Superhuman is worse than everyone else, none of it is acceptable. An immediate partial solution is for us to push very hard for email providers not to load remote images by default, and (better) for image providers to load remote images one-by-one, rather than in a single batch (which would make it less likely that a user will accidentally turn the tracking pixel on with a single click). An email provider loading images by default should be derided the same way that loading a blog post over HTTP currently is. Have good defaults that protect your users. There should be a swath of email providers on Twitter right now reassuring their customers that tracking pixels won't get loaded by default in their clients. If you're upset about this, I don't want you to be less upset. But I want you to think about being also upset about stuff like Amp for email, which will make it even easier for companies to pull this crap. I want you to also be upset about email providers that don't turn off images by default, or that don't do any background caching to obscure IP addresses. There's a large number of obvious improvements to make in this area, and a lot of discussion to be had about non-obvious improvements. If people are only mad at Superhuman, then the overall machine will continue as normal, and all that anger won't actually accomplish much in the long term. Superhuman is calling this a critical feature, so they're not getting rid of read receipts. My perspective is that their business model is built on a technology that shouldn't work. They're speculating whether there could possibly be a technology to support consent. I couldn't care less about theoretical consent technologies, I want their entire business model to stop existing.
- gjs278 7y ago
  lol holy shit dude. their business model doesn't rely on the tracking. they're just a mass email sender. they could get rid of this and be fine but then all their users would leave. literally only you would want the load images 1 by 1 feature. everyone just wants the mass load. your anger won't accomplish anything.
- danShumway 7y ago
dkhenry 7y ago
No one who is outraged by this didn't know this was going on with almost every email tool out there. I don't understand how this manufactured outrage gets hyped, when literally every email tool in existence does this as standard practice. Every marketing email you get from a brand has this tracking. Every customer support email has this tracking. Every feedback form has this tracking. Every receipt for every purchase has this tracking. Every signup form for your kids friends birthday parties has this tracking. Every single pull request notification you get from GitHub has this kind of tracking. Go to your inbox right now pick any email message and view the source. You will most likely find a 1px by 1px tracking pixel. I imagine anyone who works at any company that uses any kind of digital tool uses this exact same method to track people, so why the outrage here. Go tell your marketing departments to turn off email tracking in Salesforce, or to stop the marketing team from running campaigns with tracking in them.
- spamizbad 7y ago
  There’s a big difference between a tracking pixel in a bulk marketing email and read-receipting direct, personal or business emails. Also this so-called “manufactured outrage” was started by a product VP at InVision. The call is coming from inside the house on this one.
  - massaman_yams 7y ago
    There's less of a clear line between bulk and "business" email than you might think, particularly prospecting email. Looks 1:1 in terms of content, but is sent in bulk and has tracking pixels. But other than that, I agree. From a privacy perspective, there's some advantage to just being one row of millions in the marketing database; it's the aggregate behavior that they care about, not individual.
- danShumway 7y ago
  Story time! Recently, I've been thinking back to when lack of SSL was a huge, widespread problem on the Internet. This was back in the mid 2009-2010's, and at that point, one company in particular was lagging: Facebook. So some random person made a browser extension that automatically collected the login credentials of everyone who opened Facebook on whatever public network you were connected to.[0] Then they publicly released it for free. Ironically, the very first comment in the article I link here is, "Okay, it's evil, but how is this news?" But the Firesheep plugin was a really big influencing factor in forcing not just Facebook, but a number of companies to switch their entire sites to HTTPS. The point I'm trying to make is not that you should go out and blow up the world to make a statement -- it's that it's possible for there to be a problem that's trivial to exploit, and that is regularly exploited by criminals and businesses, and that is widely known to be exploitable, and for some reason people will still ignore it. But if it's personal, if your next-door neighbor or your weird coworker can suddenly start doing it, then something clicks and people realize, "Oh, this is actually a real problem." There's no technical difference between what Superhuman was doing and what every other marketer is still doing, but people are weird about what exactly they're willing to care about, and if the Superhuman controversy can be used to direct some of that anger towards structural, useful goals, then is that really a problem? I understand that sometimes the specific triggers that make people care are stupid, but my response to that is never to ask people to care less. It's already hard enough to make people care about things. [0]: https://lifehacker.com/firesheep-sniffs-out-facebook-and-other-user-credential-5672313 https://lifehacker.com/firesheep-sniffs-out-facebook-and-oth...
Skunkleton 7y ago
I really don't get what the fuss is about here. You are being tracked online. Why get upset about this specific instance?
- stevenjohns 7y ago
  I have no idea either. I track every email I send out. The issue with tracking, when done by companies, is what they use that data for. People don't want to have sales profiles built on them or have their literal privacy - in terms of their personal web traffic - being invisibly tracked and potentially exploited by bad actors. On a personal level, I send emails for a variety of reasons, and I haven't found a good reason why I wouldn't want to know when they were accessed. 1. I've sent legal correspondence and it's important for me to have a record of when and how frequently it was accessed in case it ever reached court. 2. When I send emails to my staff, I'm less interested in whether or not they reply and more interested in whether or not they read the emails at all. If not, then I can use alternative and more immediate forms of communication. 3. Sometimes I'm ignored by people that owe me money for one reason or another (in one particular case, I was almost scammed out of $40,000). Knowing that the correspondence I was sending was being accessed but was being ignored allowed me to take more immediate action. I'm not building profiles on people, I'm not trying to sell anything. And I'm not going to apologise for it either. My intentions are not malicious, so that's where it starts and stops for me.
  - orangecat 7y ago
    My intentions are not malicious In scenarios 1 and 3, your intention is to spy on people to gain an advantage over them in legal proceedings. That's going to qualify as "malicious" from their perspective.
    - stevenjohns 7y ago
      You think having a transactional log to stop people from lying in court is a bad thing and has me doing harm? What unfair, malicious gain do I receive by being able to present evidence that says that someone did in fact read correspondence? Respectfully, you’re in a very small camp there. You might as well call security footage or fingerprint evidence malicious as well. The same goes for snail mail that has delivery confirmation. If anything, this thread has just reinforced my belief that I’m doing the right thing.
netik 7y ago
Sadly they followed the path of nearly every surveillance capitalism startup out there. 1. Breach user trust by acting without user consent. 2. Market it as a service. 3. Eventually get caught. 4. Offer an apology. Rinse, Repeat. I don't have any real complaints about the steps they took to correct this. I have complaints about the fact that they did it in the first place and didn't consider the users. I also take offense at their investors who continued to invest while knowing this was going on.
techslave 7y ago
how about a browser or email extension that repeatedly and randomly loads the pixel. for bonus points, through a wide set of proxies.
foobiekr 7y ago
Every statement ever made by a tech company that went over the line and decided to step back from it should automatically, in your mind, be appended by "for now." Superhuman is getting rid of this _for now_. Also works for mobile carriers and pretty much any statement they make ever.
kareemm 7y ago
It's remarkable that he was able to quantify the demand for his feature: "at the time of writing only 32 out of 26,000+ requests [was for turning off Read Receipts]". There's a lot of Superhuman skepticism in the comments, but their CEO owned the decision and responded quickly. If you assume good intent, it's remarkable in its comprehensiveness, transparency, and speed. If you don't, well, you probably wouldn't be satisfied by anything other than ripping the feature out. Which wouldn't make sense for the business given the demand from its primary customer segment.
- vageli 7y ago
  > It's remarkable that he was able to quantify the demand for his feature: "at the time of writing only 32 out of 26,000+ requests [was for turning off Read Receipts]". A company managing customer feature requests is suddenly remarkable? For a tool aimed at professionals? I would take that as par for the course.
  - kareemm 7y ago
    It's remarkable to track 26k requests. That's non-trivial. Especially with the ability to drill down to a single feature request. I know this is non-trivial because I run a business that helps product teams do this. I talk to PMs at companies you've heard of and probably use that struggle with this.
    - gnicholas 7y ago
      I don't know what tool they use to get user feedback, but it would be trivial for me to find out how many user requests we've gotten for a feature like read receipts: just do a search for "read receipts" in our contact email inbox. Might it miss some requests that didn't have the exact phrase? Yes, but it's in the CEO's interest to have a count that is very low, since he's trying to say that their users haven't asked about this much. So it might be hard to get an exact count of how many people asked for some feature (particularly if it doesn't have an agreed-upon name, like "read receipts", but if you're just looking for one phrase and don't mind erring on the low side, this should be a pretty easy exercise.
nexuist 7y ago
"I am so very sorry for this. When we built Superhuman, we focused only on the needs of our customers. We did not consider potential bad actors. I wholeheartedly apologize for not thinking through this more fully." Rare to hear such honesty from a CEO. I don't think I've ever seen a corporate leader admit they didn't consider product security. Concerning? Maybe - but I think it's miles better than the usual "we value your privacy and use industry standard blah blah blah.." canned spiel everyone gets in their inbox after a breach goes public.
- vageli 7y ago
  > "I am so very sorry for this. When we built Superhuman, we focused only on the needs of our customers. We did not consider potential bad actors. I wholeheartedly apologize for not thinking through this more fully." > Rare to hear such honesty from a CEO. I don't think I've ever seen a corporate leader admit they didn't consider product security. Concerning? Maybe - but I think it's miles better than the usual "we value your privacy and use industry standard blah blah blah.." canned spiel everyone gets in their inbox after a breach goes public. A company that has access to your email did not consider bad actors, and that is a "maybe" of a concern for you?
  - nexuist 7y ago
    Perhaps I should have included the full context: "1. Location data could theoretically be used nefariously This criticism is the most severe. Upon reading the commentary, I have come to understand that there are indeed nightmare scenarios involving location tracking. I should note that we deliberately do not show cities — we only show states or countries — but a determined attacker could still misuse this information. I am so very sorry for this. When we built Superhuman, we focused only on the needs of our customers. We did not consider potential bad actors. I wholeheartedly apologize for not thinking through this more fully." This isn't a case of them having invalid SSL certs or improperly validating data sent to an endpoint. This is them building a feature that could have been used in bad ways and not realizing it. To that end, I am not very concerned about product security in this instance, because I have no reason to not trust their honesty.
Dwolb 7y ago
Super on brand response: personal, quick, and well thought-out. Kudos to the team for their ability to handle a crisis. On the topic of read receipts, I'm glad this is opening up a broader discussion about (pretty common) industry practices that track individual user activity across the web. IMO this will be a whole set of behaviors that will be viewed as having been on the wrong side of history: We'll look back in 50 years and wonder why we would have ever legally let so much invasive tracking technology into our lives (we didn't know! but everyone was doing it!).
oh_sigh 7y ago
Why do 'power users' care if people read their emails?
xwdv 7y ago
This pisses me off more than it should. I used to be interested in Superhuman, but after they backed down I no longer care about getting an invite. It’s nobody’s business what email client I use. I would like to see a bold email client that offers all these extensive tracking features and makes no apologies. Call it Supervillain for all I care, there is a market for it. If you don’t want to be tracked, don’t accept images from me or anyone else. Simple as that.
drevil-v2 7y ago
The quality and depth of introspection from the leadership of an organization, when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, is a truly epic spectacle to behold. The more cynical among us might even think they knew exactly what they were doing but did it anyway for their own profit and to the determent of others and the only thing they are actually sorry for is that they got caught.
voidmain 7y ago
The technical solution to tracking pixels isn't to disable remote image loading, it's to load all remote images when receiving the mail over smtp, and embed them in the mail. That way the sender gains no information whatsoever that they didn't already get from the smtp exchange.
sandGorgon 7y ago
how is this working ? Gmail caches pixels - https://help.litmus.com/article/166-how-are-gmail-opens-reported-within-email-analytics https://help.litmus.com/article/166-how-are-gmail-opens-repo... >When Gmail automatically downloads and caches images, those cached images—including open tracker pixels, like the ones used with Email Analytics—are stored on Gmail’s servers. Gmail then loads the same images from the same servers for everyone—regardless of whether they open using Gmail in a web browser or a Gmail Android or iPhone/iPad app.
- weavie 7y ago
  Presumably every email gets sent a unique pixel name.
  - sandGorgon 7y ago
    Even so. It will get cached, so the analytics should fire only the first time it's opened. Not subsequent times.
Rainymood 7y ago
Some food for thought: Imagine how crazy it would be if we would have these tracking devices on real life physical mails, you'd get a letter in the mailbox and you open it and read it. Without you knowing the sender has put a tiny device in there to track whether you opened it or not. When framed like this, I can't help but feel we are all kind of crazy on the web!
- gerikson 7y ago
  You used to send sealed letters with the reasonable expectation that it would arrive intact and unread. Now everyone[1] sends the equivalent of a postcard - the vast majority of which are actually read/scanned by the entities doing the delivery. [1] apart from the weirdos who use encryption
shafyy 7y ago
Can't believe the amount of jabronis here saying "what is the big fuss, everyone tracks everything anyways". Companies (and individuals) should act ethical and in good faith, regardless of what others do. So, if you have a chance to improve something, you should do it. Make a superior product that also doesn't track users without explicit content. Superhuman definitely acted the right way with this decision.
mrhappyunhappy 7y ago
Please have your email solution tell me that you are tracking opens, so that I will never correspond with that sender again. I think tracking opens without notifying the recipient is a blatant privacy violation. If that’s where society is heading, I want to part of that.

169 points by DVassallo 7y ago

Discussion yesterday of controversy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20336762 Highly visible blog posts are indeed the best way of effecting change, although the investors who were criticizing the original article now look very silly.

lanrh1836 7y ago
Yes, not even a few hours ago a VC at Founders Fund tweeted “...there's a strong correlation between the people outraged by privacy and the people that I think are dumbasses in the valley.” Source: https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1146430814374117376?s=21 https://twitter.com/zebulgar/status/1146430814374117376?s=21
- hadsed 7y ago
  Amazing to find a VC who not only isn't concerned but actively derides concerns around privacy. Maybe he has a terrible personal opinion (in my opinion), but this seems like a poor perspective from someone who should be worrying about existential threats to companies. Someone should tell the US Senate that "capitalism baby" is an appropriate response to privacy violations!
- M2Ys4U 7y ago
  Good to know that Founders Fund thinks human rights are stupid, and therefore should be avoided at all costs.

lanrh1836 7y ago

Now the CEO is getting praised on Twitter but this doesn’t address the main complaint which is the read status itself. Yes, location made it worse, but that data was mostly bunk anyway because Gmail (and probably others) will show the location of the Gmail server and not the user themselves.

aiddun 7y ago
You can still get location data from any email on an external mail client (mail.app, Mail app, etc with images loaded). Gmail only proxies images in the browser client (and maybe the the mobile app?).
kasey_junk 7y ago
It does address it. He specifically says that it is table stakes for his software and that they are leaving it in. You may not like that but it is addressed. Personally I like that response, though I think they have legal problems in some jurisdictions. They didn’t try to weasel word their way out.

hashkb 7y ago

It's tracking without consent, plain and simple. Forcing users to choose between HTML email and being tracked is nefarious. Users by default do not assume they're being tracked. Just like unsub, highly visible opt out of tracking should be the law. Morally there's no question.

harryh 7y ago

"Recipients of emails cannot opt out....I would love to find better technology to solve this problem." How about...put a notification of tracking in emails that contain it rather than making it invisible and then include an opt out link? That seems....not hard.

crispinb 7y ago
Honesty? This is tech. This is business. You're speaking a foreign language to both.
derefr 7y ago
That allows you to opt out only after having had your first open tracked. Presumably a technological solution would allow the client to opt out of even that first pixel (hopefully while not having to opt out of displaying non-tracking images.)
- harryh 7y ago
  Ya, that makes my proposal imperfect, however I contend that it would be a huge improvement over the status quo.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    How about you include an opt in link? If the service is so valuable then this should be fine.
- kylec 7y ago
  Maybe Superhuman could delete the tracking info it gathered when you opt-out
  - bigiain 7y ago
    And we should 100% trust them to do that, because they've demonstrated responsible stewardship of user data so far. Or not.
7y ago

lrpublic 7y ago

Surely this a massive breach of GDPR ?

harryh 7y ago
IANAL but this discussion of the topic seems to indicate that you are correct if any SuperHuman users send emails with invisible tracking pixels to anyone in the EU. https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/email-tracking/ https://www.gdpreu.org/compliance/email-tracking/
kasey_junk 7y ago
‘Massive’? I’d be surprised if they have anywhere near the incidents of tracking pixels that a bog standard small ad network has. No one will be able to tell accurately until a ruling comes down but I believe this is a gdpr violation but one they won’t be fined for if they do basic location filtering for their tracking pixels.
- lrpublic 7y ago
  I was thinking, massive is the sense that any (business) user of the service might be considered in breach of GDPR for obtaining personal datan without consent.
- talaketu 7y ago
  A "bog standard small ad network" does not typically have the email address of the ad viewer.

tsieling 7y ago

When these things happen, to me the more important thing is what will leadership do to change the thinking that led to the problem. Issuing a patch is a solid step, but it's a symptom that points to a need for change in how features are vetted and thought through.

ocdtrekkie 7y ago

Honestly: This was... pretty fast, the response is not just a statement of belief, but a clear list of changes they intend to implement quickly, and I really have no major complaints about how they've handled this. If someone wants to use tracking pixels, they'll find software that does it, so I'm really okay with them keeping the feature in... with the removed location information. (I am going to block it anyways, let's be honest.) And most importantly, they recognized the power of defaults for setting how people tend to behave. Making the feature non-default will crater it's use percentage across their customer base.

bigiain 7y ago
> the response is not just a statement of belief, but a clear list of changes they intend to implement Sure. But it's also an indication of what their team thought "this is fine!" about, before an internet shitstorm rained down upon them. In my mind they're always to be suspected of being either naive or actively evil in their use of personal data. Anybody who launches "a powerful business tool", and then later tells us "We did not consider potential bad actors. I wholeheartedly apologize for not thinking through this more fully." is not someone I'd want running _my_ business tools. I'm now wondering if they considered "bad actors" finding their open MongoDB databases on Shodan? Or their public S3 buckets with their backups? Or their production API keys and secrets in their pubic GitHub code? Or all those other mistakes that everybody goes "but nobody except idiots would do that!" and yet we read about it multiple times per week anyway... Maybe these guys have a great Email tool. I strongly doubt they have an entrenched culture of "considering bad actors" and appropriately investing effort and securing all the non customer facing infrastructure...
- ocdtrekkie 7y ago
  To be honest, I would suspect a large percentage of tech startups had failed to consider bad actors until the last year or two. Don't get me wrong, it's not perfect, but I've seen far too many companies respond to controversy with how they care and will think about how to make things better, while not making any significant changes at all. This is a big step above that.

wmab 7y ago

I don't think Superhuman should have caved to this criticism as quickly as they did. Good that they kept the feature, albeit dumbed down. People pay for a power user email client because it's exactly that - a power user tool, which should be fully featured. If you remove read receipts then there are a whole host of other email clients that will gladly give you that feature (bye-bye revenue). Is someone going to write a Medium post calling out each of these companies too? There is also a bunch of companies that aren't primarily email clients - like CRMs (Pipedrive etc) that offer this feature out the box, as it's exceptionally useful for sales teams. If there really was such mass hysteria regarding read receipts in emails (WhatsApp has it by default too?) then it should be your email provider that should be leaned on to secure their system. Google has known for a very long time about this, and has changed the loading of images to stop location tracking, presumably the only thing they actually think is controversial with read receipts.

Spooky23 7y ago
Read receipts for email are the worst. Groupwise shops used to often have an awful culture about waiting on/complaining about when mail was opened.

sterlind 7y ago

Shot in the dark, but could tracking pixels fall afoul of wiretapping laws? It's a single bit of information, but it is a 1-bit recording gathered without the other party's consent.

kasey_junk 7y ago
Tracking pixels have been a normal part of the email ecosystem for more than 20 years. If an esoteric use of the law was going to stop it it would be done by now.
- netik 7y ago
  This is basically what GDPR is designed to stop.
  - kasey_junk 7y ago
    That’s not reusing old law, that’s a law designed purposely to stop this.
- inetknght 7y ago
  Tracking pixels have been complained about for a long time too. There are actual real people who have actual real physical problems with being tracked and their law says they have freedom to privacy but it's normally violated.
- nerdponx 7y ago
  We should leave Jim Crow voting laws in place because they have been a normal part of the electoral system for 150 years.
6d6b73 7y ago
That single bit carries a lot of potential information with it: - location - time when the person is active i.e does the victim use computer at 11pm? - mail client used - potential to connect user with other services using ip/MUA tracking

kixiQu 7y ago

I didn't expect this, but it's actually everything I would have reasonably wanted from them. Dang!

danShumway 7y ago

Put me in the camp that this is not out of the ordinary for what most marketing emails are already doing. Also put me in the camp that it's unacceptable. My takeaway is that Superhuman is a scuzzy company that I want nothing to do with, but my takeaway is also that Superhuman backing down doesn't really solve the problem. Everybody does this -- and I don't care if Superhuman is worse than everyone else, none of it is acceptable. An immediate partial solution is for us to push very hard for email providers not to load remote images by default, and (better) for image providers to load remote images one-by-one, rather than in a single batch (which would make it less likely that a user will accidentally turn the tracking pixel on with a single click). An email provider loading images by default should be derided the same way that loading a blog post over HTTP currently is. Have good defaults that protect your users. There should be a swath of email providers on Twitter right now reassuring their customers that tracking pixels won't get loaded by default in their clients. If you're upset about this, I don't want you to be less upset. But I want you to think about being also upset about stuff like Amp for email, which will make it even easier for companies to pull this crap. I want you to also be upset about email providers that don't turn off images by default, or that don't do any background caching to obscure IP addresses. There's a large number of obvious improvements to make in this area, and a lot of discussion to be had about non-obvious improvements. If people are only mad at Superhuman, then the overall machine will continue as normal, and all that anger won't actually accomplish much in the long term. Superhuman is calling this a critical feature, so they're not getting rid of read receipts. My perspective is that their business model is built on a technology that shouldn't work. They're speculating whether there could possibly be a technology to support consent. I couldn't care less about theoretical consent technologies, I want their entire business model to stop existing.

gjs278 7y ago
lol holy shit dude. their business model doesn't rely on the tracking. they're just a mass email sender. they could get rid of this and be fine but then all their users would leave. literally only you would want the load images 1 by 1 feature. everyone just wants the mass load. your anger won't accomplish anything.
danShumway 7y ago

dkhenry 7y ago

No one who is outraged by this didn't know this was going on with almost every email tool out there. I don't understand how this manufactured outrage gets hyped, when literally every email tool in existence does this as standard practice. Every marketing email you get from a brand has this tracking. Every customer support email has this tracking. Every feedback form has this tracking. Every receipt for every purchase has this tracking. Every signup form for your kids friends birthday parties has this tracking. Every single pull request notification you get from GitHub has this kind of tracking. Go to your inbox right now pick any email message and view the source. You will most likely find a 1px by 1px tracking pixel. I imagine anyone who works at any company that uses any kind of digital tool uses this exact same method to track people, so why the outrage here. Go tell your marketing departments to turn off email tracking in Salesforce, or to stop the marketing team from running campaigns with tracking in them.

spamizbad 7y ago
There’s a big difference between a tracking pixel in a bulk marketing email and read-receipting direct, personal or business emails. Also this so-called “manufactured outrage” was started by a product VP at InVision. The call is coming from inside the house on this one.
- massaman_yams 7y ago
  There's less of a clear line between bulk and "business" email than you might think, particularly prospecting email. Looks 1:1 in terms of content, but is sent in bulk and has tracking pixels. But other than that, I agree. From a privacy perspective, there's some advantage to just being one row of millions in the marketing database; it's the aggregate behavior that they care about, not individual.
danShumway 7y ago
Story time! Recently, I've been thinking back to when lack of SSL was a huge, widespread problem on the Internet. This was back in the mid 2009-2010's, and at that point, one company in particular was lagging: Facebook. So some random person made a browser extension that automatically collected the login credentials of everyone who opened Facebook on whatever public network you were connected to.[0] Then they publicly released it for free. Ironically, the very first comment in the article I link here is, "Okay, it's evil, but how is this news?" But the Firesheep plugin was a really big influencing factor in forcing not just Facebook, but a number of companies to switch their entire sites to HTTPS. The point I'm trying to make is not that you should go out and blow up the world to make a statement -- it's that it's possible for there to be a problem that's trivial to exploit, and that is regularly exploited by criminals and businesses, and that is widely known to be exploitable, and for some reason people will still ignore it. But if it's personal, if your next-door neighbor or your weird coworker can suddenly start doing it, then something clicks and people realize, "Oh, this is actually a real problem." There's no technical difference between what Superhuman was doing and what every other marketer is still doing, but people are weird about what exactly they're willing to care about, and if the Superhuman controversy can be used to direct some of that anger towards structural, useful goals, then is that really a problem? I understand that sometimes the specific triggers that make people care are stupid, but my response to that is never to ask people to care less. It's already hard enough to make people care about things. [0]: https://lifehacker.com/firesheep-sniffs-out-facebook-and-other-user-credential-5672313 https://lifehacker.com/firesheep-sniffs-out-facebook-and-oth...

Skunkleton 7y ago

I really don't get what the fuss is about here. You are being tracked online. Why get upset about this specific instance?

stevenjohns 7y ago
I have no idea either. I track every email I send out. The issue with tracking, when done by companies, is what they use that data for. People don't want to have sales profiles built on them or have their literal privacy - in terms of their personal web traffic - being invisibly tracked and potentially exploited by bad actors. On a personal level, I send emails for a variety of reasons, and I haven't found a good reason why I wouldn't want to know when they were accessed. 1. I've sent legal correspondence and it's important for me to have a record of when and how frequently it was accessed in case it ever reached court. 2. When I send emails to my staff, I'm less interested in whether or not they reply and more interested in whether or not they read the emails at all. If not, then I can use alternative and more immediate forms of communication. 3. Sometimes I'm ignored by people that owe me money for one reason or another (in one particular case, I was almost scammed out of $40,000). Knowing that the correspondence I was sending was being accessed but was being ignored allowed me to take more immediate action. I'm not building profiles on people, I'm not trying to sell anything. And I'm not going to apologise for it either. My intentions are not malicious, so that's where it starts and stops for me.
- orangecat 7y ago
  My intentions are not malicious In scenarios 1 and 3, your intention is to spy on people to gain an advantage over them in legal proceedings. That's going to qualify as "malicious" from their perspective.
  - stevenjohns 7y ago
    You think having a transactional log to stop people from lying in court is a bad thing and has me doing harm? What unfair, malicious gain do I receive by being able to present evidence that says that someone did in fact read correspondence? Respectfully, you’re in a very small camp there. You might as well call security footage or fingerprint evidence malicious as well. The same goes for snail mail that has delivery confirmation. If anything, this thread has just reinforced my belief that I’m doing the right thing.

netik 7y ago

Sadly they followed the path of nearly every surveillance capitalism startup out there. 1. Breach user trust by acting without user consent. 2. Market it as a service. 3. Eventually get caught. 4. Offer an apology. Rinse, Repeat. I don't have any real complaints about the steps they took to correct this. I have complaints about the fact that they did it in the first place and didn't consider the users. I also take offense at their investors who continued to invest while knowing this was going on.

techslave 7y ago

how about a browser or email extension that repeatedly and randomly loads the pixel. for bonus points, through a wide set of proxies.

foobiekr 7y ago

Every statement ever made by a tech company that went over the line and decided to step back from it should automatically, in your mind, be appended by "for now." Superhuman is getting rid of this _for now_. Also works for mobile carriers and pretty much any statement they make ever.

kareemm 7y ago

It's remarkable that he was able to quantify the demand for his feature: "at the time of writing only 32 out of 26,000+ requests [was for turning off Read Receipts]". There's a lot of Superhuman skepticism in the comments, but their CEO owned the decision and responded quickly. If you assume good intent, it's remarkable in its comprehensiveness, transparency, and speed. If you don't, well, you probably wouldn't be satisfied by anything other than ripping the feature out. Which wouldn't make sense for the business given the demand from its primary customer segment.

vageli 7y ago
> It's remarkable that he was able to quantify the demand for his feature: "at the time of writing only 32 out of 26,000+ requests [was for turning off Read Receipts]". A company managing customer feature requests is suddenly remarkable? For a tool aimed at professionals? I would take that as par for the course.
- kareemm 7y ago
  It's remarkable to track 26k requests. That's non-trivial. Especially with the ability to drill down to a single feature request. I know this is non-trivial because I run a business that helps product teams do this. I talk to PMs at companies you've heard of and probably use that struggle with this.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    I don't know what tool they use to get user feedback, but it would be trivial for me to find out how many user requests we've gotten for a feature like read receipts: just do a search for "read receipts" in our contact email inbox. Might it miss some requests that didn't have the exact phrase? Yes, but it's in the CEO's interest to have a count that is very low, since he's trying to say that their users haven't asked about this much. So it might be hard to get an exact count of how many people asked for some feature (particularly if it doesn't have an agreed-upon name, like "read receipts", but if you're just looking for one phrase and don't mind erring on the low side, this should be a pretty easy exercise.

nexuist 7y ago

"I am so very sorry for this. When we built Superhuman, we focused only on the needs of our customers. We did not consider potential bad actors. I wholeheartedly apologize for not thinking through this more fully." Rare to hear such honesty from a CEO. I don't think I've ever seen a corporate leader admit they didn't consider product security. Concerning? Maybe - but I think it's miles better than the usual "we value your privacy and use industry standard blah blah blah.." canned spiel everyone gets in their inbox after a breach goes public.

vageli 7y ago
> "I am so very sorry for this. When we built Superhuman, we focused only on the needs of our customers. We did not consider potential bad actors. I wholeheartedly apologize for not thinking through this more fully." > Rare to hear such honesty from a CEO. I don't think I've ever seen a corporate leader admit they didn't consider product security. Concerning? Maybe - but I think it's miles better than the usual "we value your privacy and use industry standard blah blah blah.." canned spiel everyone gets in their inbox after a breach goes public. A company that has access to your email did not consider bad actors, and that is a "maybe" of a concern for you?
- nexuist 7y ago
  Perhaps I should have included the full context: "1. Location data could theoretically be used nefariously This criticism is the most severe. Upon reading the commentary, I have come to understand that there are indeed nightmare scenarios involving location tracking. I should note that we deliberately do not show cities — we only show states or countries — but a determined attacker could still misuse this information. I am so very sorry for this. When we built Superhuman, we focused only on the needs of our customers. We did not consider potential bad actors. I wholeheartedly apologize for not thinking through this more fully." This isn't a case of them having invalid SSL certs or improperly validating data sent to an endpoint. This is them building a feature that could have been used in bad ways and not realizing it. To that end, I am not very concerned about product security in this instance, because I have no reason to not trust their honesty.

Dwolb 7y ago

Super on brand response: personal, quick, and well thought-out. Kudos to the team for their ability to handle a crisis. On the topic of read receipts, I'm glad this is opening up a broader discussion about (pretty common) industry practices that track individual user activity across the web. IMO this will be a whole set of behaviors that will be viewed as having been on the wrong side of history: We'll look back in 50 years and wonder why we would have ever legally let so much invasive tracking technology into our lives (we didn't know! but everyone was doing it!).

oh_sigh 7y ago

Why do 'power users' care if people read their emails?

xwdv 7y ago

This pisses me off more than it should. I used to be interested in Superhuman, but after they backed down I no longer care about getting an invite. It’s nobody’s business what email client I use. I would like to see a bold email client that offers all these extensive tracking features and makes no apologies. Call it Supervillain for all I care, there is a market for it. If you don’t want to be tracked, don’t accept images from me or anyone else. Simple as that.

drevil-v2 7y ago

The quality and depth of introspection from the leadership of an organization, when they get caught with their hand in the cookie jar, is a truly epic spectacle to behold. The more cynical among us might even think they knew exactly what they were doing but did it anyway for their own profit and to the determent of others and the only thing they are actually sorry for is that they got caught.

voidmain 7y ago

The technical solution to tracking pixels isn't to disable remote image loading, it's to load all remote images when receiving the mail over smtp, and embed them in the mail. That way the sender gains no information whatsoever that they didn't already get from the smtp exchange.

sandGorgon 7y ago

how is this working ? Gmail caches pixels - https://help.litmus.com/article/166-how-are-gmail-opens-reported-within-email-analytics https://help.litmus.com/article/166-how-are-gmail-opens-repo... >When Gmail automatically downloads and caches images, those cached images—including open tracker pixels, like the ones used with Email Analytics—are stored on Gmail’s servers. Gmail then loads the same images from the same servers for everyone—regardless of whether they open using Gmail in a web browser or a Gmail Android or iPhone/iPad app.

weavie 7y ago
Presumably every email gets sent a unique pixel name.
- sandGorgon 7y ago
  Even so. It will get cached, so the analytics should fire only the first time it's opened. Not subsequent times.

Rainymood 7y ago

Some food for thought: Imagine how crazy it would be if we would have these tracking devices on real life physical mails, you'd get a letter in the mailbox and you open it and read it. Without you knowing the sender has put a tiny device in there to track whether you opened it or not. When framed like this, I can't help but feel we are all kind of crazy on the web!

gerikson 7y ago
You used to send sealed letters with the reasonable expectation that it would arrive intact and unread. Now everyone[1] sends the equivalent of a postcard - the vast majority of which are actually read/scanned by the entities doing the delivery. [1] apart from the weirdos who use encryption

shafyy 7y ago

Can't believe the amount of jabronis here saying "what is the big fuss, everyone tracks everything anyways". Companies (and individuals) should act ethical and in good faith, regardless of what others do. So, if you have a chance to improve something, you should do it. Make a superior product that also doesn't track users without explicit content. Superhuman definitely acted the right way with this decision.

mrhappyunhappy 7y ago

Please have your email solution tell me that you are tracking opens, so that I will never correspond with that sender again. I think tracking opens without notifying the recipient is a blatant privacy violation. If that’s where society is heading, I want to part of that.