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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 ta
by 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 agolol 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 agoJust to follow up on this, I currently use Fastmail for email. I like Fastmail, a lot. But why doesn't Fastmail block remote images by default? Yes, they have a setting, but why isn't it turned on for new accounts? If I tell my parents to sign up for Fastmail, I don't want to have to worry about whether or not their default settings are safe.
- troydavis 7y agoFastMail does block (well, decline to load) remote images by default: https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/remotecontent.html https://www.fastmail.com/help/receive/remotecontent.html If you aren't using FastMail's webmail, it's your email reader's responsibility. FastMail quite reasonably doesn't rewrite email content.
- danShumway 7y agoIs that new? I set up an account maybe a month ago, and when the Superhuman story broke, that was my reminder to check my settings in the webmail client. It was set to load all images. It's possible I would have turned that on by mistake, but only if I really wasn't paying attention. Edit: I just set up a brand new trial account and checked, and the webmail client is definitely set to load remote images by default. If that's not intended, maybe it's a bug that needs to be fixed.
- bigiain 7y ago
- drdaeman 7y ago> An immediate partial solution Why this is a partial solution? Tracking is only possible because receivers' MUAs do a wrong thing. If the technology makes tracking impossible (except for various hacks/exploits), then the whole problem is resolved.
- danShumway 7y agoYou still have user error to consider -- a user might deliberately choose to load all images by default, or they might click "load all" from the email settings without thinking. Arguably, this is their own fault at that point, but I'm not sure it's reasonable to expect them to understand the risks. This is why I would prefer click-to-display on each individual image instead of a "load all" button. Even that isn't necessarily perfect, but it does take you a long way. An even better solution might be for the email provider to preload images when the email is delivered (not opened), and then either serve them from an online cache when you opened the email, or inline them into the message itself. However, now you're talking about rewriting emails, and I can understand why people might not want that -- it comes with its own set of downsides. It would also probably increase operating costs as well, I assume.
- jiri 7y agoClick to display cannot solve this completely, it will change general practice from using one tracking pixel to make all images tracking. Although, it could work for text emails with just tracking pixel.