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Comment by RandallBrown | Hacker News Reader

In these sort of articles, I wonder why the author never considers benign intentions.

The conversation could have easily been

"Read receipts are a useful feature." "Yeah. Let's add them"

And that was it. Lots of people are not privacy focused and don't think of this as a problem, so it would never occur that their seemingly benign feature could have bigger consequences.

It's pretty easy for people who care to "turn off read receipts" by disabling images or blocking it through proxy/vpn/whatever.

I personally don't like read receipts, so I will likely not use superhuman. I just don't view it as some major problem.

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Sure, never assume malice when it could be just ignorance/stupidity. But at the end of the day, this is a major product and service ($33M in VC funding so far [0]). Even though the author tweets (and includes the screencap) "Superhuman is a surveillance tool that intentionally violates privacy...", my impression overall was that his main complaint was about a company's culture and ethical decision-making process:

> Second, I want to talk about why this particular issue is so important. Not why privacy is important; we are all already learning that the hard way. Rather, why making ethical decisions at the earliest stages of your company is important.

> When a company first forms, there are no norms or principles guiding how its people should make decisions. It’s basically just what’s in the founders’ heads. With each decision a company makes, its “decision genome” is established and subsequently hardened...

In other words, if this is a decision Superhuman made early on and embedded into its main product, then, the author argues, we should be very wary of its culture, and how it will weigh-in on privacy issues going forward. It's from this claim that the author seems to have built his anger on.

Read receipts have been a feature of email and messaging clients for at least more than a decade now. Among the tech-literate, the tradeoffs and potential problems/controversies are well-known, such that opting-in (or out) of read receipts is a near-ubiquitous option in every service's account settings. I'm sorry, but it really stretches plausibility to think that Superhuman put in as little thought about it as you propose.

[0] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/superhuman#section-o...

It's pretty easy for people who care to "turn off read receipts" by disabling images or blocking it through proxy/vpn/whatever.

What about non technical people who have no way of learning that they are being spied upon?

Likewise, "turn off read receipts" and "disable images" seem like two different things.

My thesis is that if you care about being tracked enough that you'd want to turn it off, you're also technical enough to do it.

I may be wrong.

Go find a non technical person and ask them these two questions:

"Do you care if your ex-girl/boyfriend can tell every time you read an old email s/he sent you?"

"Have you disabled loading images by default in your email client?"

You will see that you are wrong.

EDIT: decided to listen to my own advice and conduct a (very non scientific obvs) twitter poll.

https://twitter.com/harryh/status/1146120438432616450

You're ignoring the vast majority of people who aren't aware that it's possible yet would care a great deal if they knew about it. In fact, that's the whole premise behind tracking pixels. It's victim blaming.

> It's pretty easy for people who care to "turn off read receipts" by disabling images or blocking it through proxy/vpn/whatever.

Setting aside the difficulty, being pressured to disable a generic feature (image loading) for a degenerate use case of that feature (user tracking) is annoying.

The author does, explicitly, consider benign intentions. But beyond serving as a read receipt it also includes location data and timestamps for each 'read' which is much harder to consider as due to a benign intention (from the perspective of the recipients).

Other email clients support 'read receipts' without using tracking pixels. It's not impossible that Superhuman chose to use tracking pixels for a good reason, but I can't think of one and I haven't read of one either.

How do they do that without tracking pixels?

They use Message Disposition Notifications.

We thought about this a lot at Boomerang, and decided to do it in a more recipient-friendly way by making read receipts visible & opt-out (and excluding all location information). Our read receipts were well received but we still get a lot of requests for more comprehensive read receipts. It’s tough to balance.

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