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You might not need to store plaintext email addresses
- Vanit 6y agoTo support: Hey, I closed my Facebook account and would like you to delete my data for me? Oh...
- amelius 6y agoThey could simply check whether the hash they stored corresponds to your email address.
- Vanit 6y agoGood catch, I missed in the conclusion that they suggested hashing the email if necessary (earlier in the article they mentioned only hashing the identifier).
- nurettin 6y agoIn this case they will have to provide their facebook id which they probably did not store and have a means of authentication which they deleted.
- danielskogly 6y agoYou're right that could be an issue, but hopefully anyone who registered via Facebook will take care to add an email/password to their account and disconnect Facebook before they delete their Facebook account.
- BlackFly 6y agoThere is either Personally Identifiable Information, or there is not. If there is then identity can be confirmed and the account deleted. If there is not then there is nothing that needs to be deleted.
- GoblinSlayer 6y agoYou must first prove it's your account.
- webmobdev 6y agoIt's a good idea to protect user privacy. One drawback I can think of storing a hashed email is - What if the user forgets the username / email id and wants to know it? (This is a common use case). In such a case you have to collect additional unique data to help the user gain access to their account, but that defeats the original purpose - to protect user privacy.
- hardwaresofton 6y agoYou could use a combination of TOTP/google/facebook or some other side channel verification and use that to allow unlimited tries for a certain period of time to allow for more guesses? I'm thinking that for the most part people generally have/keep <5 email addresses (that they use often enough to log in with) so they should be able to just iterate through the list of emails that they've used over their lifetime and figure it out? I do wonder though -- if the hash secret gets out then I think we're right back to where we started... it would be easy to cross-reference leaded email DBs with the dumped DB and work backwards. I'm now a bit less sure this does much for use privacy against an even slightly motivated opponent (one who would almost certainly have access to at least one dump of previously-exposed emails)...
- opk 6y agoPeople often forget usernames but not so often e-mails. The e-mail is usually the primary/only means of identifying users anyway so you're not going to provide it back on request anyway.
- Hitton 6y agoThey won't forget the email, but they might easily forget with which email they registered (happened to me).
- trengorilla 6y agoHow many e-mails could you possibly have that makes trial and error not a good solution in this scenario?
- cm2187 6y agoGood points. Though given how many emails have been leaked already, not sure sha256 with fixed salt achieves much. One can build a rainbow table with that salt fairly quickly. You might as well use bcrypt, scrypt and co.
- danielskogly 6y agoUsing something like bcrypt would definitively be better, but considering that the email is the identifier, I would have no way of retrieving the correct hash to check it against, so the salt must be fixed to allow for lookups. I'm currently using SHA512 with a fixed salt. If someone gains access to only the database and not the salt, the emails are well protected. If someone gains access to both, then it's true that they could build a rainbow table to check if a given email exists in the database. What they _can't_ do is easily use all the emails in the database for spam/phishing/etc. Either way, I'd argue it's better than nothing :)
- cm2187 6y agoSorry, I missed the point about it being the identifier. Though technically you can still use the bcrypt hash as your identifier, unless it has to be correlated to an external source of emails.
- cortesoft 6y agoYou cant, really... bcrypt hashes are not consistent... you run bcrypt on the same email, you are going to get two different hashes. You can't search your DB for the matching hash, you would have to iterate through every entry to compare.
- waheoo 6y agoUse the password as the salt. Still need a fixed salt but that should help.
- Kliment 6y agoDoesn't that break account recovery requests?
- RobertoG 6y agoMaybe this is not important in your user-case, but what if you have a database breach and you have to warm your users?
- medecau 6y agoArticle 34.3.a seems to disavow the data processor of such requirement. The communication to the data subject referred to in paragraph 1 shall not be required if any of the following conditions are met: (a) the controller has implemented appropriate technical and organisational protection measures, and those measures were applied to the personal data affected by the personal data breach, in particular those that render the personal data unintelligible to any person who is not authorised to access it, such as encryption; https://gdpr-info.eu/art-34-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-34-gdpr/
- SahAssar 6y agoI don't think hashing and encryption are considered equivalent in this case.
- GoblinSlayer 6y ago>(c) it would involve disproportionate effort. In such a case, there shall instead be a public communication or similar measure whereby the data subjects are informed in an equally effective manner.
- jlcummings 6y agoSo far I haven’t seen a comment point this out or suggest similar, so let’s say that instead of trying to maintain an application level list of email addresses that is used in a breach (or for other reasons), rely on the exercising service (email) which by formerly sending a verification email, has a record of the destination at least in a log, and maybe during registration placed in a “verified member” list, all more or less managed within the mail service.
- inopinatus 6y agoThis scheme struggles in the face of email address case folding. At the protocol level, email addresses are case-folded on the RHS but case-sensitive on the LHS. So it’s crucial that LHS case is preserved by delivery systems. Unfortunately most users then treat them as folded on both. So you can successfully verify one variant, store the downcased hash, and it’ll subsequently match but delivery bounces. Or, hash the exact original input but have many baffled users unable to access their accounts. Neither is a good outcome. This is not an edge behaviour either, I have tons of users that mix up their email capitalisation from day to day.
- opk 6y agoNo it doesn't, convert the case when generating the hash – think of it as part of the hash function. But leave the case unchanged from whatever the user entered for any steps that involve sending an e-mail to the address.
- inopinatus 6y agoThat is what produces the first failure mode described, viz. bouncing email, when delivering to a case-sensitive mailbox.
- laszlokorte 6y agoBut wouldnt the user face this issue all the time if they have a case sensitive mailbox but type their own address in the wrong case? So the assumption may be that a user with a case sensitive mail box is used to typing in the correct address?
- inopinatus 6y agoNo — many accounts aren’t created by the people that use them, and in any case we shouldn’t be relying on correct repeated string input and then blaming the user for a fulfilment process failure due to a typo from hours ago that we silently accepted at the time, and (worse) we can’t even distinguish between a capitalisation error and a discontinued recipient, even if it was previously verified. As designers/developers, it’s our problem to solve.
- jeromenerf 6y agoStoring email feels like a no-brainer for a system that needs to send messages to its customers. Some prefer phone numbers, which maybe provide stronger guarantees while being maybe not as long lasting. As an individual, the issue is that "anon" or "throw-away" emails are not that commoditized. I heard that "login with Apple" meant to provide an email proxy, hiding your real email, but I have not seen it deployed, except on Reddit. As good as it can be, it’s Apple only. I can always wildcard on a domain I rent and use klingo@domain as a mean to compartment identifiers but it is not low maintenance. Still, it feels better that "login with faang".
- Semaphor 6y agohow are wildcards not low maintenance?
- jeromenerf 6y agoLack for a better word I guess. This is what I do for myself and my So, but this isn’t a commodity accessible to anyone directly by their email provider.
- whatatita 6y agoI use wildcards and they're extremely low maintenance. Literally no maintenance required since I set them up. Steps to reproduce: 1. register a domain name 2. register that domain with your email service provider of choice (I use Protonmail) 3. create an email address on that domain 4. set that address up as a catch-all address for the domain 5. profit
- tlarkworthy 6y agoI think you can store emails but process them only in an anonymizing publicly auditable proxy, ensuring that downstream business services do not have plaintext access whilst still being able to send outbound emails whenever you want. I wrote about it recently: https://futurice.com/blog/trustworthy-services-from-cloud-provider-impartiality https://futurice.com/blog/trustworthy-services-from-cloud-pr... The key is to grant cloudfunctions.functions.sourceCodeGet (Or AWS/Azure equivalent) on the edge so anybody can verify that your proxy is above board. End users just have to trust the Cloud Providers access controls, not the service providers word on implementation.
- scoot 6y ago"You might not need to store user email addresses" Emails and email addresses are two very different things.
- dang 6y agoOk, we've addressed the topic in the title above.
- strogonoff 6y agoIn technical writing within this industry, “email” is interchangeably used to mean either the protocol, an address or a message, depending on context. “If user confirmed their account by entering a confirmation code received via email or phone, that email or phone number becomes verified” is a routine sentence that will confuse no one.
- Veen 6y agoIt is confusing when the referent is ambiguous. In the original title, email could mean either of two things, and there is no way to tell which it is. As an irrelevant aside, if you insist on justifying web content, “hyphens: auto” is your friend.
- strogonoff 6y agoAmbiguity is ever-present in human language, I’d say I rarely know precisely what I will read about when clicking a link here. Confusion between “email address” and “email message” is relatively mild, in fact (post about Kafka from not long ago comes to mind). I am not the OP, and frankly I don’t believe full justification has a place on the web just yet. Hyphenation alone is rarely enough to make it bearable, and I think browsers’ rendering engines don’t do more than that.
- scoot 6y ago> “email” is interchangeably used to mean either the protocol, an address or a message "email" isn't a protocol. SMTP is though, and referring to RFC 5321 ("a specification of the basic protocol for Internet electronic mail transport"), section 2.3.11 [1], we see that: "As used in this specification, an "address" is a character string that identifies a user to whom mail will be sent or a location into which mail will be deposited." https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-2.3.11 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5321#section-2.3.11
- ThePhysicist 6y agoIn most cases, encrypting sensitive information like e-mail addresses with a memory-resident key (e.g. injected using tools like Vault) in the application layer is a better strategy, at least if you need asynchronous access to that information (e.g. to send out weekly update e-mails). Most of the data leaks in the past were caused by compromised or misconfigured databases, not by compromised application server code. Also, within the EU I need to be able to proactively reach my users (e.g. to notify them about a data loss), so only storing hashes of e-mail addresses and hoping users will log in so that I can send them an e-mail won't work.
- aitchnyu 6y agoIs that generalizaion true for other forms of data theft too? I feel that way about some wrongly public s3 buckets and document leaks.
- ThePhysicist 6y agoSure if you encrypt with an application-level key it makes it harder for any adversary to use your data, as he/she will need to not only get access to your data but also obtain the encryption key to do anything with it. Encrypting data like this is easy and can drastically reduce your attack surface.
- franky47 6y agoThis kind of encryption-at-rest scheme becomes an absolute necessity when cryptographic secrets have to be stored, such as 2FA TOTP secret keys or recovery codes. Encrypting the email addresses and any Personally Identifiable Information on your users may also be a good practice, to limit which eyes can actually see the plaintext data (database provider, former developers without rotated credentials, an old backup left over..). One issue with this though could be the inability to use the encrypted field for queries (eg: select * from users where email = 'foo@bar.com'), but OP's solution of hashing can help here: store the email encrypted, its hash in clear text, and do a query on the hash.
- 6y ago
- Kwpolska 6y agoThat might be in breach of the GDPR. In the event of a personal data breach, you need to tell the data subjects about the breach [0]. You can’t just put a notice on your page, since someone might not be using your service any more, but you still have their data. And GDPR aside, it is very short-sighted to assume you will never ever need to e-mail users on your own. [0]: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-34-gdpr/ https://gdpr-info.eu/art-34-gdpr/
- diggan 6y agoYou comment was dead, I vouched for it as it's a valid assumption that you have to notice users on breach. But in this case, it seems like the following applies (34.3.A from your link): > The communication to the data subject referred to in paragraph 1 shall not be required if any of the following conditions are met: > the controller has implemented appropriate technical and organisational protection measures, and those measures were applied to the personal data affected by the personal data breach, in particular those that render the personal data unintelligible to any person who is not authorised to access it, such as encryption; With emphasis on the "in particular those that render the personal data unintelligible". Since the email is no longer an email, it should not be counted as personal data, it's just random characters, and no notification needed. IANAL, but that's how I understand it.
- moortaube 6y agoI would totally agree with you, diggan. I understand it the same way.
- gberger 6y agoMaybe this is a dumb question but how do you send an email if you only have the hash of the recipient's address?
- peteretep 6y agoAs per the article, you only send them when the user requests an action, and ask them for their email at that time
- gberger 6y agoOh. I would be pretty annoyed if I had to re-enter my email address every time I perform an action that sends out a transactional email...
- Liquid_Fire 6y agoOn this website, this only happens for actions that require entering your email address anyway. > For every transactional email I need to send out - registration, account recovery, and email change verification - the user always initiates this by submitting their email, and it will at that time be available to the backend to perform the needed action.
- canofbars 6y agoSo this only works if you only use the email as a username. No way to notify the user of things like ToS changes, security issues, notifications from the service, etc.
- whatatita 6y agoSome services don't have the desire (or need!) to send out generic service notifications. For ToS changes, it's often enough to display them to the user when they first log in after the change. That's how many mobiel apps handle it already. The security notification thing could be an issue though. Doesn't seem to be necessary per the GDPA but it's probably a good idea to communicate security breaches.
- raziel2p 6y agoYou use email+password for login. Does this mean that on every login attempt, you iterate through every row in the database to check for a hash match?
- q3k 6y agoI mean, how's that different from 'iterating' over every row in search of an email address? Indexes solve that.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kle 6y agoYes, exactly as you would do to check for an email address match.
- akmittal 6y agohash the email first and then check for same hash in db.
- wtetzner 6y agoBut don't you need to know which salt to use?
- wccrawford 6y agoI think the others are missing the fact that if you use the same salt for every row, it's less secure. So you'll be storing the email more securely, but still not as securely as you should be storing the password. To do it any more securely would require pulling up every single record for its salt, and hashing the login with that salt and checking it. It's virtually impossible at any real scale.
- raziel2p 6y agoHah, when I wrote my comment above I didn't even consider the possibility of using the same salt everywhere. I suppose the goal here is privacy, not information security, so it's okay.
- markvdb 6y ago> Earlier this year, when I went from having only Facebook-login [...] to allow registrations with email and password, one of my concerns was how to implement this is a way that protects the data and privacy of my users. Any privacy effort is laudable. Then again, if you're serious about protecting your users' data and privacy, Facebook login is the elephant in the room.
- danielskogly 6y agoI fully agree, so when I released the update with email/password registration, I also stopped allowing new account creations via Facebook. Now it's only supported for login for legacy reasons, and those users can disconnect their Facebook account after connecting an email.
- raxxorrax 6y agoFully agree and you can be certain that Facebook does save your E-Mail address. I use authentication services like auth0 and AWS cognito. The first one I think is completely safe for privacy, the second one is used for convenience (I think the service is good for stuff you host on AWS anyway, although it is generic, so it isn't restricted to that). But using an auth-service is mostly about deferring risk of breaches to people more proficient in security. That comes with the cost that said auth service can know which services registered users are using. The author is correct though. While a user that employs such an auth service, it can be good practice to hash the mail-address or even other identifiers for you own DB (you still need that to associate state with a user).
- Fnoord 6y agoIts all about liability. With GDPR, you want to be compliant. Also see Schneier's 'data is a toxic asset' essay. Though I don't know about it being compliant I suppose Facebook Login (and other forms of SSO) shifts the reliability to Facebook.
- gingerbread-man 6y agoWouldn't the lack of means to contact all of your users, immediately and directly, create other compliance challenges? You would be unable to notify users of a data breech until their next login; former users might be left permanently in the dark. Similarly, being unable to push legally mandated notice of policy updates could be an impossible challenge. I can see how this proposed scheme could work day to day, but you would likely be well served to retain un-hashed emails in cold storage.
- Fumtumi 6y agoSounds unnecessary complicated for no real benefit with issues along the road. And it does feel weird to use Facebook in this example. If you don't care for an email address, and you are using the login only for maintaining that list, use an permalink. Thats probably easier and better. One permalink for edit, one permalink for viewing.
- danielskogly 6y agoFacebook is only mentioned in the context of how I did things previously, before I implemented the email/password registration.
- Fumtumi 6y agoWhat was your main motivation to put so much effort in making sure that you are not storing his/her email address?
- miki123211 6y agoOne thing worth noting is that often, you don't even need to store passwords. If a user wishes to log in, you send them a link/code by email. That increases security dramatically, as most email services already have some more advanced protections built-in. You also don't have to worry about leaks that much, as there are just no passwords to be leaked.
- viraptor 6y agoPlease don't do that. It makes me very angry when I'm trying to quickly get some information from a public/shared device and instead of getting logged in, I get a link on my device. (which I need to retype / send / ...) Most likely I don't care about the security of the account that much in that case. But my email login never goes anywhere close a device I don't own. Don't annoy users. Just let them log in.
- nkristoffersen 6y agoTo be fair, that scenario is increasing security. Shared/public devices are not considered secure at all.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoHuh, considering the case (& Unicode) issue (that I wasn't aware of !), shouldn't using email addresses as logins be considered bad practice ?
- llimos 6y agoWe did this slightly differently. For login we stored a hash of the normalized email address (all lowercase, and handling gmail's dots and plusses). For sending emails we had them encrypted in a separate database, which only the mail-sending servers had access to - not the web-facing servers. That way we didn't need to ask for the email address every time, and it was still fairly well protected.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mischanix 6y agoThe more important takeaway from this article for me is that sites should be hashing the Facebook user ID, since it's often far more personally-identifiable information than an email address.
- cblconfederate 6y agoId is already hashed per-app from facebook's side
- nulbyte 6y agoThe article points out that this doesn't maintain privacy: > I discovered that, even though the ID was unique to my FB-app, it was still possible to go to facebook.com/{id} and be redirected to the user’s FB-profile.
- stjo 6y agoI admire your dedication to keeping your users data secure, anonymous and private. > For Wishy.gift I use SHA512 with a fixed salt Just a FIY in case you don’t know: if you want to allow different accounts with the same email, in case of a data breach it would be obvious by the duplicate hash this has occurred. Salting with a different nonce for every row is not much harder and would protect in that case.
- dastx 6y agoHow would you check for duplicate entries if you use a different salt per entry?
- stjo 6y agoCheck every previously generated salt with the currently received email for collision.
- NiceWayToDoIT 6y agoLets imagine that a@exam.com and b@exam.com have same hash, so you use different salt so that they are different. How do you know which one is which? Which salt belongs to what email?
- megous 6y agoDon't forget to NOT store email server logs either. ;) Otherwise this exercise is kinda pointless.
- perlgeek 6y ago... or if you do, make sure they are deleted pretty quickly afterwards (with logrotate or something comparable). Having some logs in invaluable for debugging, but for example keeping them only for 14 days could be an acceptable compromise between debugability and privacy.
- AndrewStephens 6y agoThis is a clever idea but limited in applicability. It is probably fine for a low security web app or game, but could still leak personal information if the db got hacked. The problem is that the salt has to be the same for each record and that emails present a limited search space. Imagine I stole the database for blackmailable-fetish.com. All the emails are hashed with the same salt so I can brute-force the following restricted space: [top 200 first names][top 1000 surnames][digits from 0 - 999]@[top 5 email providers] That would probably get me 75% of the emails - let the extortion games begin!
- DarkWiiPlayer 6y agoIf extortion is a possibility, use a separate email address. This is still a good extra layer of protection though.
- identity0 6y agoNot sure why you're bringing this up. If you stored them in plaintext it gives hackers 100% of the emails with zero effort required.
- AndrewStephens 6y agoTrue, but I maintain that if you are worried that hackers may steal your email database then a much better approach is to encrypt the emails with an external key.
- minitech 6y agoBecause it gives the false appearance of security. With this scheme, you always need to act as if the e-mail addresses are plaintext anyway. It should not be used.
- jimmyspice 6y agoYou could just do that anyway. I've seen spam email trying to extort people threatening to release indecent images of them (that they don't have. supposedly, they've been captured from the victims selfie cam). In this case, you don't have to be accurate, you're just trying to call someones bluff, in the small case they've actually done said thing (and in addition believe you can prove it AND that payment will silence them)
- KingOfCoders 6y agoHaven't heard of that one. I'd like to see an A/B test on conversion and long time satisfaction.
- gregoriol 6y agoThis would not work for any serious/useful service: e-mails are not only for marketing, there are many good reasons to send one like (user requested) notifications, invoicing, ... and also screw-ups! If your service had a problem (security, broken data, invoicing again, long downtime, ...), you better contact your users before they find out on hackernews.
- robertlagrant 6y ago> any serious/useful service Sigh.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- kordlessagain 6y agoPlaintext email could be stored client side in a cookie and may be submitted to the server when use of the email is required, and if it validates. If the user logs in and the site is down, a backup system could email them about the issue. This is the backup system, primary systems are down. Please contact support if you need more information. No need to email users who aren't using the system currently about downtime, or in fact no need to email users if they aren't using the system. Further, if a "password recovery" flow is modified slightly, it can be repurposed for password-less logins by using strong tokens sent to user email, as they request them. A simplified 2FA flow can be established as well, where a token is texted the user after verifying email address. A second layer of security to texting tokens can be achieved using Google Authenticator. To use such a system, the user will need to be OK with sending their email address each time they need email from the system AND be OK with having their phone handy to login. Of course not every use case requires security, or can be used with this proposed security system.
- kevincox 6y agoBut how do you contact users if they aren't on the site? What if you have a data breach and need to notify them or need to remove their account because they are inactive and want to give them a heads up.
- pgt 6y agoWhen signing up for a service, I always sign up with <name-of-service>@<my-domain.com>, which makes it easy to see who sold my email address and to filter/block by service.
- crazygringo 6y agoSidenote, but I find this post maddening to understand, because the author seems to be using the word "e-mail" to mean both "e-mail address" and "e-mail message", and then uses ambiguous pronouns to boot: > In conclusion, if you only use emails for transactional emails, you might be able to only store hashed versions of them. HUH? The most obvious way to interpret this sentence is as storing hashed versions of transaction e-mail messages. Which makes no sense and isn't what the author means, but wow this is some confusing writing.
- pc86 6y ago"Most obvious" only if you make the conscious decision to ignore the context of the entire article, maybe. The author isn't a native English speaker.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- danielskogly 6y agoThank you for this! I realize now how confusing that is. An updated version should be up any second :)
- nwsm 6y ago> For every transactional email I need to send out - registration, account recovery, and email change verification - the user always initiates this by submitting their email address, and it will at that time be available to the backend to perform the needed action. This sounds like terrible UX, not to mention email use cases not initiated by the user. I really think you'd be shooting yourself in the foot by setting up a small site with this philosophy because you don't need emails right now
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- simonw 6y agoSome things that become difficult if you don't have a verified email address for your users: - Most common: a user has a support request because they can't get into their account (e.g. you have sign-in-with-Facebook and they lost their account there, or got banned). - Your authentication partner (again e.g. Facebook) disables your integration for some reason - someone reports your account as abusive (maybe maliciously) and it gets locked, and your attempts to work through Facebook customer support hit a brick wall. If you have email addresses you can at least get your users back into their accounts via a reset-password style flow. - You have a data breach, and you need to tell your users what happened and what private data of theirs was leaked to an attacker. - You get a legal threat - a DMCA takedown message for example - and need to pass it on to your users. - You sell your service to another company and the lawyers involved in the transaction insist on emailing out a terms of service update. There are plenty more.
- hinkley 6y agoBetween 'yes' and 'no' we could still have airgapped or at least segregated systems, where an email address is known, but only to the part of the system responsible for communication.
- simonw 6y agoIn larger systems that could be a reasonable way to build things. Keeping email addresses in the "auth" microservice which has tighter security - blocking security team code reviews, a smaller team who are allowed to modify it for example.
- hinkley 6y agoRight? And especially in these event stream architectures we like to use now. We still use outbound mail queues don't we, if for no other reason than to control the blast radius of any bugs in the system. I don't need to send you a mail, I need to tell the system that handles mail to send you a mail. As long as I spend a small amount of care on avoiding the Confused Deputy scenario (eg, open relay), that would work better and contain much of the PII to a low-traffic (network and, as you say, code delta) system.
- hinkley 6y agoI wonder what a database that supported a moral equivalent of cgroups would look like. I can't create a record, I can't delete a record, I can't see the email field, but I can change the subscription plan for this user, or change their avatar. We tend to do table or row level permissions, matrixed with verb. Column level occurs at the application layer, leaving plenty of room underneath for exfiltration.
- Mandatum 6y agoYeah with data breaches becoming more and more common, I really think it's irresponsible to not have a way of contacting your users. Sure, you could throw a banner up on your website - but the comms should be immediate. This might be reasonable for a service that doesn't sell anything, or there's absolutely nothing owed to users and users have no reasonable expectation of privacy. But any commercial or professional organisation that doesn't have a method for contacting end-users is either A. Shady as fuck (numbered accounts, darknet-hosted, ignorance by design), or B. irresponsible. This is a website who's pure purpose is to extract PPC/ad and referral revenue from its users. There's no personal information requested from users, other than "Display Name". This is actually one of few exceptions I think the owner of the website is being more responsible with their user's data by not keeping anything. However, if they are breached and are serving malware to customers for a week before realising, they will have no way to tell their users they may have been affected. Or what if someone decides to install a backdoor and log the user's email and password when logging in? This is nitpicking and honestly probably 1% of websites hacked in this way actually notify their customers, but it's nevertheless still a hole in the design. They're also likely capping their earning potential if they do plan to sell the website, as they don't have any delicious user data to sell to marketers.. For which I commend Daniel and Bjorn! Well done. I don't know, I'm thinking this is great, but also pretty bad. Maybe adding an opt-in for breach notifications would be useful, or having a third-party service to subscribe to breach notifications for the website would be the best of both worlds.
- nicbou 6y agoThis is the sort of content I come on HN for. It introduced me to a possibility I haven't considered, and it's followed by an interesting debate in the comments. Thank you for sharing. The most important caveat I can think of is the ability to inform irregular users about something important, either for legal or ethical reasons. For example, my note taking app is shutting down, and users might have important things stored there. I could also message them about a deprecated feature, a change to the ToS, or ironically a data breach. Nonetheless, it's still a good idea and I'll keep it in mind.