Hacker News Reader

Comment by mannykannot | Hacker News Reader

"An initial confirmation that the survey was legitimate was followed by a denial from the same Otter representative, laced with a warning that I “not respond to that survey and delete it.” My communications with Otter were all restricted to email and were sporadic, often confusing and contradictory."

That's where the story rises above the mundane.

View on HN

Could be something more, but Occam's Razor says it's just support being like wtf is this and dropping the ball in handling the request.

If support at your company got an email saying "omg! sensitive information in our recording is being referenced in this random survey we got from you!" I guarantee 2/3 companies would flub the initial response because the support person doesn't understand the technical side of the issue which is that titles are used in one of the survey templates

Journalists who deal in sensitive material should not trust any of that to any third parties to the greatest extent possible. If I were Chinese intel or the FBI, otter would be one of the richest targets imaginable for some of the most prized information on earth, i.e. high-value intel targets spilling secrets in "full-confidence" and divulging information they might never reveal even in court. otter also transcribes medical/psych convos and legal discussions as well, bringing the sum total of what they could "know" about any human, willing or not, to scary levels.

Journalists who are casual or reckless with this kind of data shouldn't be in the business, and companies that don't make these kinds of risks apparent to their user base, or go to lengths to disguise a clear conflict of interest as bad support should not be in that business either.

Right but my point is there is nothing surprising or groundbreaking about the the fact that the journalist received the survey and that it contained the information that it contained, but media coverage of this is treating it like there was some shocking breach or cooperation with a foreign power when really it's quite a mundane situation by all accounts.

The shocking revelation should be that journalists who normally are so careful they use end-to-end client-side encryption for their communications are using third party transcription services that have full access to their sensitive interviews. That's a faux pas and critical security blunder on the journalist's part, not otter's, though one learning here is maybe otter should consider offering some sort of secure enclave service for situations like this with additional guarantees and client-controlled encryption keys.

The whole story would be much more clear with a complete email chain. We're given fragments and interpretations, but since the whole episode stems from a misunderstanding, none of it is reliable.

"Not respond to that survey and delete it" is also the ending of a sentence that begins "if you would feel more comfortable, you can".

Well, that is interesting - when I access that article through the link above, the phrase "not respond to that survey and delete it" occurs just once, in the passage I quoted in my original post, which does not contain the phrase fragment "if you would feel more comfortable, you can..." - in fact, this phrase does not occur at all.

Where are you getting your information from - is there a link to this correspondence, in the article or elsewhere?

Well, that's the point. We don't know the first half of the sentence.

You wrote, in what is a complete paragraph, '"Not respond to that survey and delete it" is also the ending of a sentence that begins "if you would feel more comfortable, you can".' [my emphasis.]

'Is also' has very different implications than 'could have been'.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com