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Comment by CurtHagenlocher | Hacker News Reader

I can see how this might be surprising for people, but it's also basically how email has always worked -- so it's a bit weird to ding Gmail for it. The address book would need to have two entries for names: one for you to type as a shortcut, and one to put on the outgoing message.

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I'm trying to work out how the author came to the presumption that contact names would ever be private. As in, what other software are they using where that would be a standard feature?

The closest I can come to is _maybe_ SMS where names never transit the system, only the phone numbers. So whatever name you associate to a number in your phone stays in your phone.

Email has certainly never worked that way.

My phone is how I track most of my contacts, so it makes sense to me that someone would assume email contacts work the same way.

I’ve was surprised by an email that revealed my saved contact name recently, and I used to work for an email company.

> what other software are they using where that would be a standard feature?

In WhatsApp I can give a contact name to a number but I don't believe anyone else sees it. Even if I tag them using @ in a group chat - I suspect that everyone just sees the name that they've set for that contact.

It's always interesting when you get a glimpse into a foreign way of thinking about the world. It makes sense that someone for whom email has always been a process of interacting with a website might not realize that the "to" line is really just a free-form text field, and that all apparent structure is being applied ad-hoc by the client. But are you even thinking about email as something which has a client, if you're using GMail? I can see how it would be reasonable to imagine that the big mystery machine which appears to control the whole process would have some master database of email addresses in it somewhere.

I mention in the post that, if nothing else, this feels more like a UX failure.

Yeah, this _is_ expected behavior, but at the same time I think will catch most people off guard, especially people who aren't as technically inclined.

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