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The exact phrasing you have used here is repeated multiple times in the Twitter thread, and I can only conclude that "pushed out a fix" is what your marketing d

The exact phrasing you have used here is repeated multiple times in the Twitter thread, and I can only conclude that "pushed out a fix" is what your marketing department has decided to call what you have done. What you have right here and right now is a public relations disaster. Trust in your brand has been damaged. It cannot be repaired by you providing minimal information. Your standardised message is akin to "Don't worry your little heads over the details - trust us, everything is fine now", and to be honest I find it a bit insulting. As far as we know, "pushed out a fix" could mean that you have hidden the tracking, so it is harder to find. Your short message is making the public relations disaster worse, not better. These are the steps that you need to take: 1. Provide an explanation of why tracking was being performed in the first place, including an analysis of how much of that was a mistake. 2. Make an apology for breaching your customers' trust. This is a really important step, and it should be repeated in each of your press releases. 3. Provide details on the steps you have taken to fix the problem, and what that means for tracking data. 4. Make a promise that strictly limits the level of tracking that you will be allowing yourself to make in the future. Ideally we would all want that to be zero, and if you intend to do business with certain jurisdictions then you are limited to what is legal, but you must in any case be clear about what tracking you will ever do. Honesty and transparency are the keys at this point to restoring your brand. I do not think the community will accept anything less.

elefantastisch 6y ago
This. Yev, if you are not in the upper management chain of Backblaze, please show mnw21cam's message to someone who is. The problem is not that there was a little bug which caused the Facebook tracker to get a few little pieces of information it shouldn't have. The problem is that Backblaze failed to understand how to distinguish appropriate and inappropriate uses of third-party trackers for signed-in users on a security-critical application. The Facebook pixel should never have been there at all. It shouldn't even have been considered. It should've been an absolute no-brainer that Facebook has no business being on secure pages on a critical infrastructure service for paying customers. The fact that the pixel even showed up at all on a logged in page represents a breach of trust for customers and casts doubt on Backblaze's competence in handling security issues. This warrants a serious reply from the CEO, not a copy-pasted meaningless reassurance.
- KindOne 6y ago
  OP is "Senior Director Of Marketing" according to Linkedin. He posts a lot on HN and Reddit in Backblaze posts. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/author/yev/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/author/yev/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/yevpusin/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/yevpusin/
  - atYevP 6y ago
    Yev here - :)
leokennis 6y ago
While on a personal level I agree with you, there is a saying in Dutch: "je moet niet wrijven in een vlek", which translates to "don't rub in a stain". Sort of like the Streissand Effect; if BB starts posting press releases about "breaching trust", filled with apologies, the audience that will become aware of this issue will be a lot bigger than it currently is. So from a PR persepctive, a one line low key "we pushed a fix" reply makes total sense.
- dnzm 6y ago
  Being open and making clear that you understood you goofed would be total opposite of the Streisand effect - where you'd try to _silence_ discourse with the unintended effect of amplifying it. Right now, the issue is being downplayed, much to the chagrin of an increasingly knowledgeable set of computer users.
gjs278 6y ago
lmao. nobody cares this much.
rsync 6y ago
"What you have right here and right now is a public relations disaster. Trust in your brand has been damaged. It cannot be repaired by you providing minimal information." I'm not sure that's true. There are a number of barely-technical subreddits, typically centered around Plex or some flavor of bittorrent, that consist of an all-day-every-day request for "as much cloud storage as possible for the lowest possible cost and please say it's free". These are not HN readers. It's as if they attained consciousness two minutes ago and one minute ago they decided they needed cloud storage. This is the audience these kind of analytical tools are geared toward and I don't think this changes their "engagement" or their "convertibility" or their "lifetime value". The real information here is that in 2021, and in conjunction with a much more sophisticated product offering (B2), Backblaze is very aggressively pursuing flat-rate, loss-leaders who can be influenced and targeted by facebook. Draw what conclusions from that you will.
- williamsmj 6y ago
  B2 is not flat rate pricing. It's $5/TB. I understand that is a lower price than your own product, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they're losing money. You seem to be implying that their covering the losses on storage by selling customer data. Is that correct? In which case, would you like to be a bit more specific and explicit?
  - rsync 6y ago
    No - I am drawing a distinction between B2 and the "unlimited" plans that I assume to be loss-leaders. Aren't those the kind of users you can monetize through social media "engagement" ? I don't think it's the B2 users... which class of users had data leaks ?
    - williamsmj 6y ago
      B2 users had the data leak. But just to be clear: is your claim that the unlimited storage consumer backup plan is a loss leader, and they cover their costs by selling the backed up data (or metadata) to the likes of Facebook?
spyder 6y ago
Huh? "... and will provide updates as we have them. "
- atYevP 6y ago
  Yev here -> we wanted to make sure we were able to investigate the root cause so we knew what we were talking about. We've completed that root cause analysis and have updated our blog post with additional information -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tracking/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tr...
atYevP 6y ago
Yev here -> re: fixing the issue - we removed the offending code from the logged in web pages. Rest assured that we have are taking this very seriously internally and we will continue to investigate and provide updates as we have them.
atYevP 6y ago
Yev here -> Absolutely here you on that. We wanted to make sure we knew what we were talking about before we made any declarative statements. We just finished our root cause analysis and updated our blog post with updated information: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tracking/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tr....
- atYevP 6y ago
  Edit -> "hear you"

elefantastisch 6y ago

This. Yev, if you are not in the upper management chain of Backblaze, please show mnw21cam's message to someone who is. The problem is not that there was a little bug which caused the Facebook tracker to get a few little pieces of information it shouldn't have. The problem is that Backblaze failed to understand how to distinguish appropriate and inappropriate uses of third-party trackers for signed-in users on a security-critical application. The Facebook pixel should never have been there at all. It shouldn't even have been considered. It should've been an absolute no-brainer that Facebook has no business being on secure pages on a critical infrastructure service for paying customers. The fact that the pixel even showed up at all on a logged in page represents a breach of trust for customers and casts doubt on Backblaze's competence in handling security issues. This warrants a serious reply from the CEO, not a copy-pasted meaningless reassurance.

KindOne 6y ago
OP is "Senior Director Of Marketing" according to Linkedin. He posts a lot on HN and Reddit in Backblaze posts. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/author/yev/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/author/yev/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/yevpusin/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/yevpusin/
- atYevP 6y ago
  Yev here - :)

leokennis 6y ago

While on a personal level I agree with you, there is a saying in Dutch: "je moet niet wrijven in een vlek", which translates to "don't rub in a stain". Sort of like the Streissand Effect; if BB starts posting press releases about "breaching trust", filled with apologies, the audience that will become aware of this issue will be a lot bigger than it currently is. So from a PR persepctive, a one line low key "we pushed a fix" reply makes total sense.

dnzm 6y ago
Being open and making clear that you understood you goofed would be total opposite of the Streisand effect - where you'd try to _silence_ discourse with the unintended effect of amplifying it. Right now, the issue is being downplayed, much to the chagrin of an increasingly knowledgeable set of computer users.

gjs278 6y ago

lmao. nobody cares this much.

rsync 6y ago

"What you have right here and right now is a public relations disaster. Trust in your brand has been damaged. It cannot be repaired by you providing minimal information." I'm not sure that's true. There are a number of barely-technical subreddits, typically centered around Plex or some flavor of bittorrent, that consist of an all-day-every-day request for "as much cloud storage as possible for the lowest possible cost and please say it's free". These are not HN readers. It's as if they attained consciousness two minutes ago and one minute ago they decided they needed cloud storage. This is the audience these kind of analytical tools are geared toward and I don't think this changes their "engagement" or their "convertibility" or their "lifetime value". The real information here is that in 2021, and in conjunction with a much more sophisticated product offering (B2), Backblaze is very aggressively pursuing flat-rate, loss-leaders who can be influenced and targeted by facebook. Draw what conclusions from that you will.

williamsmj 6y ago
B2 is not flat rate pricing. It's $5/TB. I understand that is a lower price than your own product, but it doesn't necessarily follow that they're losing money. You seem to be implying that their covering the losses on storage by selling customer data. Is that correct? In which case, would you like to be a bit more specific and explicit?
- rsync 6y ago
  No - I am drawing a distinction between B2 and the "unlimited" plans that I assume to be loss-leaders. Aren't those the kind of users you can monetize through social media "engagement" ? I don't think it's the B2 users... which class of users had data leaks ?
  - williamsmj 6y ago
    B2 users had the data leak. But just to be clear: is your claim that the unlimited storage consumer backup plan is a loss leader, and they cover their costs by selling the backed up data (or metadata) to the likes of Facebook?

spyder 6y ago

Huh? "... and will provide updates as we have them. "

atYevP 6y ago
Yev here -> we wanted to make sure we were able to investigate the root cause so we knew what we were talking about. We've completed that root cause analysis and have updated our blog post with additional information -> https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tracking/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tr...

atYevP 6y ago

Yev here -> re: fixing the issue - we removed the offending code from the logged in web pages. Rest assured that we have are taking this very seriously internally and we will continue to investigate and provide updates as we have them.

atYevP 6y ago

Yev here -> Absolutely here you on that. We wanted to make sure we knew what we were talking about before we made any declarative statements. We just finished our root cause analysis and updated our blog post with updated information: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tracking/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/privacy-update-third-party-tr....

atYevP 6y ago
Edit -> "hear you"