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We could break down each of your personal accusations: some of them are fair and some of them aren't. But you don't really care about any of that. You're not tr

We could break down each of your personal accusations: some of them are fair and some of them aren't. But you don't really care about any of that. You're not trying to make a point here beyond, "you're hypocritical and therefore your obsession over privacy is unimportant." The only thing worth saying on that topic is that it matters very little what you (or anyone else) thinks of me, whether it be good or bad. I don't even judge myself that way; I only care about trying to be better tomorrow than I am today. Anything else is a waste of time. And certainly, my response when I encounter hypocrisy is to try and fix the hypocrisy. Not to throw up my hands and say, "well, I guess none of it matters then." The above out of the way, I want to try and engage with the deeper argument you're making in good faith. What you're missing here is that all of the business tracking and personalized profiles you bring up as the real problem are using the exact same technology as these read receipts. The point is not that read receipts are the worst thing in the world (although I think they're unhealthy and they show a lack of respect for the person you're communicating with). The point is that they illustrate the broader pattern of tracking in a form that regular people understand and emotionally connect with. That's a good thing. The other thing you're missing when you talk about criminalizing homosexuality and prohibition is that pervasive tracking is a tool that allows powerful people to oppress less powerful people. Pervasive tracking outs people's sexual preferences, it allows companies to illegally target individuals based on protected characteristics, to advertise to people at their most vulnerable moments, and to exclude them from opportunities that they would otherwise have. Far from being a nothing issue, privacy is fundamentally tied to people's ability to express themselves without fear and to hide from companies, governments, and even individuals that want to harm them. Fixing personal email tracking has a pleasant side effect of also fixing the tracking that happens in both phishing and corporate emails as well. Like you quoted: > 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. Yes, sometimes people can be encouraged to care about things that are actually unimportant, or even outright wrong. But privacy isn't unimportant; privacy is an essential tool to help protect individuals and marginalized groups from mobs, governments, companies, and individuals that don't have their best interests in mind.

stevenjohns 7y ago
My point is that this is manufactured outrage from people who don't actually care. They're just caring because it is today's flavor of the day. There are real steps people can take to support user privacy but they don't do them. People happily and voluntarily engage in objectively worse conduct for privacy day-to-day. This includes myself too -- my employer had me add not one but two separate tracking scripts on my company's homepage. I "care" about privacy yet here I am participating in stripping it away from people. > using the exact same technology as these read receipts What technology people use doesn't matter, what matters is how they use it. If I were to implement a system that tracked actions users do in a way that was ethical and completely not personally identifiable, then it doesn't matter - there is no problem, regardless of what technology is used to do it. > Fixing personal email tracking has a pleasant side effect of also fixing the tracking that happens in both phishing and corporate emails as well I don't think so. At all. This is like banning plastic straws to save the planet. It is mutating what is basically a porch security camera into a discussion on oppressive government surveillance. The two are not the same. Personal email read receipts have almost no bearing on privacy at all. This is perhaps the point that is being missed by most people.
- danShumway 7y ago
  So, there is a part to this argument I agree with -- which is that getting mad exclusively at Superhuman ultimately accomplishes very, very little. Because you're right, this is absolutely everywhere, and literally every non-personal email you get has these same trackers. My hope with this whole controversy of the week is that it leads people to disable loading remote images by default, and it leads email providers to change their default settings. I don't want to see people riled up just for angers sake -- I want to see that anger directed towards making changes that help with the entire spectrum of email pixel trackers. This is where I think we disagree: > What technology people use doesn't matter, what matters is how they use it. You make a good point that Superhuman isn't doing anything unique, and you make an (arguable) point that what Superhuman is doing isn't even that bad on its own terms. But if you have to trust companies or 3rd parties to be responsible with a technology, you're still leaving yourself open to less ethical attackers. The safest fix is to get users onto platforms where no one can track them, even if those trackers are deployed in responsible ways. Think of it this way -- you make a completely reasonable assertion that including Google Analytics on a web page is a personal violation of privacy[0]. When I get around to removing Analytics from Loop Thesis, that will be an improvement. But I'm not under the illusion that doing so will affect anyone other than my visitors on my site. There are two steps to this process. One is to be personally responsible about what we do. The other (equally important) step is to empower users such that they don't need to rely on us being responsible -- by encouraging them to install ad blockers, by building browsers that resist fingerprinting, and so on. I want to respect people's privacy, but more than that, I want them to be private regardless of whether or not I'm trustworthy. Encouraging products like Gmail or Fastmail to block images by default is not the biggest step in the world -- it certainly doesn't fix everything. But it is a step, and it makes things slightly better. There is no short checklist to fix omnipresent surveillance; it's a long, arduous road where we hope that things gradually get better over time. The outrage over Superhuman will be beneficial if it encourages some people to change a setting in their email clients that they didn't know existed. [0]: https://gitlab.com/danShumway/site/commit/c294dc81ae330ec432133252b3b2c489e0fc9da9 https://gitlab.com/danShumway/site/commit/c294dc81ae330ec432...

stevenjohns 7y ago

My point is that this is manufactured outrage from people who don't actually care. They're just caring because it is today's flavor of the day. There are real steps people can take to support user privacy but they don't do them. People happily and voluntarily engage in objectively worse conduct for privacy day-to-day. This includes myself too -- my employer had me add not one but two separate tracking scripts on my company's homepage. I "care" about privacy yet here I am participating in stripping it away from people. > using the exact same technology as these read receipts What technology people use doesn't matter, what matters is how they use it. If I were to implement a system that tracked actions users do in a way that was ethical and completely not personally identifiable, then it doesn't matter - there is no problem, regardless of what technology is used to do it. > Fixing personal email tracking has a pleasant side effect of also fixing the tracking that happens in both phishing and corporate emails as well I don't think so. At all. This is like banning plastic straws to save the planet. It is mutating what is basically a porch security camera into a discussion on oppressive government surveillance. The two are not the same. Personal email read receipts have almost no bearing on privacy at all. This is perhaps the point that is being missed by most people.

danShumway 7y ago
So, there is a part to this argument I agree with -- which is that getting mad exclusively at Superhuman ultimately accomplishes very, very little. Because you're right, this is absolutely everywhere, and literally every non-personal email you get has these same trackers. My hope with this whole controversy of the week is that it leads people to disable loading remote images by default, and it leads email providers to change their default settings. I don't want to see people riled up just for angers sake -- I want to see that anger directed towards making changes that help with the entire spectrum of email pixel trackers. This is where I think we disagree: > What technology people use doesn't matter, what matters is how they use it. You make a good point that Superhuman isn't doing anything unique, and you make an (arguable) point that what Superhuman is doing isn't even that bad on its own terms. But if you have to trust companies or 3rd parties to be responsible with a technology, you're still leaving yourself open to less ethical attackers. The safest fix is to get users onto platforms where no one can track them, even if those trackers are deployed in responsible ways. Think of it this way -- you make a completely reasonable assertion that including Google Analytics on a web page is a personal violation of privacy[0]. When I get around to removing Analytics from Loop Thesis, that will be an improvement. But I'm not under the illusion that doing so will affect anyone other than my visitors on my site. There are two steps to this process. One is to be personally responsible about what we do. The other (equally important) step is to empower users such that they don't need to rely on us being responsible -- by encouraging them to install ad blockers, by building browsers that resist fingerprinting, and so on. I want to respect people's privacy, but more than that, I want them to be private regardless of whether or not I'm trustworthy. Encouraging products like Gmail or Fastmail to block images by default is not the biggest step in the world -- it certainly doesn't fix everything. But it is a step, and it makes things slightly better. There is no short checklist to fix omnipresent surveillance; it's a long, arduous road where we hope that things gradually get better over time. The outrage over Superhuman will be beneficial if it encourages some people to change a setting in their email clients that they didn't know existed. [0]: https://gitlab.com/danShumway/site/commit/c294dc81ae330ec432133252b3b2c489e0fc9da9 https://gitlab.com/danShumway/site/commit/c294dc81ae330ec432...