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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

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...
- dkhenry 7y ago
  Fair point, the last thing I want to do is make people care less about privacy. I will say the one difference here is I think there are a lot of people who use this tracking for their day to day job, so its not just a random gray hat who is exploiting ignorance, in this case there are hundreds of thousands of people who are using this daily.
  - filmgirlcw 7y ago
    Yeah, people use tracking in their day to day jobs in specific contexts. The reason this generated so much outrage is that it’s not the expected behavior (thank God) for all business emails to contain tracking pixels.
- stevenjohns 7y ago
  > 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." What is "it"? Knowing I read an email they sent me? That's not what criminals and businesses are doing; criminals and businesses build extensive personalised profiles of who you are, what you like, what times you're active, where you go, who your friends, family and coworkers are and what your personal trigger points are all for the goal of exploiting you. They use email tracking as a single metric among dozens of others, and the way they evaluate the metric is completely different to how an individual would evaluate it. That data is usually then sold to other groups that do the same thing. How is that anywhere even close to an individual with email read receipts? I don't think anyone would say "this is actually a real problem" besides people manufacturing a problem out of nothing. I'm also willing to bet that 99.9% of the people that are outraged are totally willing to establish, work for, or implement an extensive user tracking system for a company that actually acts on malicious grounds (such as monitoring users or for the objectives of making sales). This includes you - by the way - a quick look through your resume shows that every single company you've worked for heavily participates in tracking and the first personal website of yours I accessed at reset-hard.com includes Google tracking which is dozens of times worse than a "weird coworker" knowing you read an email they sent. This is literally contributing to a global database of user tracking which we know is used for malicious purposes. > 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. When people care about the wrong things is when we end up with homosexuality being criminalized, prohibition or terrorist groups. So hopefully in this case - just like many others - people would focus their energy into things that actually matter. And personal email tracking is not one of them - and will never be.
eli 7y ago
A lot of people genuinely didn't know about pixel tracking in emails until they read about it in recent coverage. I agree that Superhuman is being somewhat unfairly singled out here, but that doesn't make the outrage "manufactured"
mblevin 7y ago
Exactly. And it's not just marketing emails. The dichotomy between "marketing tracks, 1-to-1 emails don't" is false. There are hundreds of millions if not a billion installs of people using tracking for 1-to-1 email. Sales people use dozens prospecting tools like Outreach.io, Salesloft, etc for tracking. Likewise, millions of individual consumers use tools like Gmelius, Mixmax, Streak, etc. This feels like either manufactured outrage or willful ignorance by a community of supposedly technology-savvy people who should know better.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  That’s disingenuous on a lot of levels. First, tools like Streak have been criticized for years. And something like MixMax which is sold as an email marketing platform thing is scuzzy and gross, but it’s fairly clear to the person signing up what it’s for and that it’s for people who send out bulk email for marketing purposes. Superhuman sells itself as an email client for professionals — it sells itself in similar ways to how Mailbox was presented before the Dropbox acquisition. The investors and sycophants defending this product might say that it’s clear to everyone that this is just an email tool for marketers, but that’s not how its own webpage sells it. If anything, this is selling itself as an email tool for VCs or people doing biz dev. And maybe every person doing M&A uses tracking pixels, but that seems like a stretch. And for there to not be an ability to turn the feature off (until the outrage), says a lot to me about the core values that went into designing this product. I would never pay for something like this or for Streak. I understand that emails I get from a marketing company or a newsletter have tracking pixels. I’m savvy enough to know others might send them too. But I will absolutely push back on the idea that it’s the expected behavior for all or even most emails, let alone willful ignorance.
  - dkhenry 7y ago
    Email tracking is wrong, and personally I have gone through many steps to try and keep myself safe from it. That being said you are incorrect if you think this is limited to Marketing and Sales. Literally every E-mail in my inbox when I wrote my initial comment had a tracking pixel. GitHub uses tracking pixels when they send you notification of Pull Requests. Square sends tracking pixels for receipts. Every notification I had in my inbox was accompanied by a tracking pixel. Superhuman isn't even the first client to do this. I know that Nylas and Mailbird both had it and I couldn't even figure out how to disable them in Newton Mail on Android. To say this is somehow about Superhuman is to deny the problem, this is an industry wide problem that everyone is culpable for
wtmt 7y ago
Everybody knows that the government, three letter agencies, shady marketers and unscrupulous businesses will try to track them or do what would be considered as nasty and evil. I think the distinction here is that Superhuman put that power (with location information) in literally everybody's hands by default (the wrong default, if one could even consider this as a switch). So someone who normally would be paranoid about a stalking ex would've taken other precautions but wouldn't have guessed that this would be so easy (yes, there are many ways people can personally track others, including using phishing and other covert methods). So the "manufactured outrage" here is more akin to, if I may be completely hyperbolic for a moment, making it easy for anyone to buy assault weapons or nuclear weapons, when everybody knows that those with evil intentions for the masses (like terrorists) would be able to get them easily anyway.
tlogan 7y ago
> this didn't know this was going on with almost every email > tool out there. Which email tool was doing this? If I install cloudHQ email tracker, mixmax, streak, Gmelius tracking, Cloud hq autobcc to Salesforce, then I do this for marketing or sales. So these are CRM utilities... But I do not expect that my email client which is promoted as "THE FASTEST EMAIL EXPERIENCE EVER MADE" has this creepy feature enabled by default. Anyway, Superhuman seems to a CRM (maybe a good one - I'm not sure) and it is not an email client. That is the difference.

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...

dkhenry 7y ago
Fair point, the last thing I want to do is make people care less about privacy. I will say the one difference here is I think there are a lot of people who use this tracking for their day to day job, so its not just a random gray hat who is exploiting ignorance, in this case there are hundreds of thousands of people who are using this daily.
- filmgirlcw 7y ago
  Yeah, people use tracking in their day to day jobs in specific contexts. The reason this generated so much outrage is that it’s not the expected behavior (thank God) for all business emails to contain tracking pixels.
stevenjohns 7y ago
> 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." What is "it"? Knowing I read an email they sent me? That's not what criminals and businesses are doing; criminals and businesses build extensive personalised profiles of who you are, what you like, what times you're active, where you go, who your friends, family and coworkers are and what your personal trigger points are all for the goal of exploiting you. They use email tracking as a single metric among dozens of others, and the way they evaluate the metric is completely different to how an individual would evaluate it. That data is usually then sold to other groups that do the same thing. How is that anywhere even close to an individual with email read receipts? I don't think anyone would say "this is actually a real problem" besides people manufacturing a problem out of nothing. I'm also willing to bet that 99.9% of the people that are outraged are totally willing to establish, work for, or implement an extensive user tracking system for a company that actually acts on malicious grounds (such as monitoring users or for the objectives of making sales). This includes you - by the way - a quick look through your resume shows that every single company you've worked for heavily participates in tracking and the first personal website of yours I accessed at reset-hard.com includes Google tracking which is dozens of times worse than a "weird coworker" knowing you read an email they sent. This is literally contributing to a global database of user tracking which we know is used for malicious purposes. > 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. When people care about the wrong things is when we end up with homosexuality being criminalized, prohibition or terrorist groups. So hopefully in this case - just like many others - people would focus their energy into things that actually matter. And personal email tracking is not one of them - and will never be.

eli 7y ago

A lot of people genuinely didn't know about pixel tracking in emails until they read about it in recent coverage. I agree that Superhuman is being somewhat unfairly singled out here, but that doesn't make the outrage "manufactured"

mblevin 7y ago

Exactly. And it's not just marketing emails. The dichotomy between "marketing tracks, 1-to-1 emails don't" is false. There are hundreds of millions if not a billion installs of people using tracking for 1-to-1 email. Sales people use dozens prospecting tools like Outreach.io, Salesloft, etc for tracking. Likewise, millions of individual consumers use tools like Gmelius, Mixmax, Streak, etc. This feels like either manufactured outrage or willful ignorance by a community of supposedly technology-savvy people who should know better.

filmgirlcw 7y ago
That’s disingenuous on a lot of levels. First, tools like Streak have been criticized for years. And something like MixMax which is sold as an email marketing platform thing is scuzzy and gross, but it’s fairly clear to the person signing up what it’s for and that it’s for people who send out bulk email for marketing purposes. Superhuman sells itself as an email client for professionals — it sells itself in similar ways to how Mailbox was presented before the Dropbox acquisition. The investors and sycophants defending this product might say that it’s clear to everyone that this is just an email tool for marketers, but that’s not how its own webpage sells it. If anything, this is selling itself as an email tool for VCs or people doing biz dev. And maybe every person doing M&A uses tracking pixels, but that seems like a stretch. And for there to not be an ability to turn the feature off (until the outrage), says a lot to me about the core values that went into designing this product. I would never pay for something like this or for Streak. I understand that emails I get from a marketing company or a newsletter have tracking pixels. I’m savvy enough to know others might send them too. But I will absolutely push back on the idea that it’s the expected behavior for all or even most emails, let alone willful ignorance.
- dkhenry 7y ago
  Email tracking is wrong, and personally I have gone through many steps to try and keep myself safe from it. That being said you are incorrect if you think this is limited to Marketing and Sales. Literally every E-mail in my inbox when I wrote my initial comment had a tracking pixel. GitHub uses tracking pixels when they send you notification of Pull Requests. Square sends tracking pixels for receipts. Every notification I had in my inbox was accompanied by a tracking pixel. Superhuman isn't even the first client to do this. I know that Nylas and Mailbird both had it and I couldn't even figure out how to disable them in Newton Mail on Android. To say this is somehow about Superhuman is to deny the problem, this is an industry wide problem that everyone is culpable for

wtmt 7y ago

Everybody knows that the government, three letter agencies, shady marketers and unscrupulous businesses will try to track them or do what would be considered as nasty and evil. I think the distinction here is that Superhuman put that power (with location information) in literally everybody's hands by default (the wrong default, if one could even consider this as a switch). So someone who normally would be paranoid about a stalking ex would've taken other precautions but wouldn't have guessed that this would be so easy (yes, there are many ways people can personally track others, including using phishing and other covert methods). So the "manufactured outrage" here is more akin to, if I may be completely hyperbolic for a moment, making it easy for anyone to buy assault weapons or nuclear weapons, when everybody knows that those with evil intentions for the masses (like terrorists) would be able to get them easily anyway.

tlogan 7y ago

> this didn't know this was going on with almost every email > tool out there. Which email tool was doing this? If I install cloudHQ email tracker, mixmax, streak, Gmelius tracking, Cloud hq autobcc to Salesforce, then I do this for marketing or sales. So these are CRM utilities... But I do not expect that my email client which is promoted as "THE FASTEST EMAIL EXPERIENCE EVER MADE" has this creepy feature enabled by default. Anyway, Superhuman seems to a CRM (maybe a good one - I'm not sure) and it is not an email client. That is the difference.