> Superhuman doesn’t even let its own customers turn images off. So merely by using Superhuman, you are vulnerable to the exact same spying that Superhuman enables you to do to others.
This is where the author's dunk on Superhuman became complete.
A Superhuman investor, who does not disclose his interest in the company, pops in to say it's the recipient's responsibility to defend their own privacy, using a method (turning images off) that Superhuman's own product makes impossible for its users.
All superhuman is doing is giving access the same tech that every company uses to monitor emails sent to individuals. If you don't like it (and you absolutely shouldn't), then don't use superhuman and turn of automatic image downloads in your email client.
The problem is that the person that "doesn't like it" isn't the user of Superhuman, it is the recipient, who doesn't get a choice as to what email client the sender is using.
And my point is that a large percentage of emails sent contain tracking pixels already. Privacy conscious recipients should already have automatic image downloading disabled.
I think this misses the points from the original post, the most critical IMO are:
(1) Recipient generally doesn't know they're being tracked. Even in the argument that 'email is catching up to IM', the recipient always knows that read receipts are turned on -- because it is built into the UI.
(2) Recipient doesn't know they're being tracked multiple times, with multiple locations. Again, in that same argument, messenger doesn't tell you the number of times I viewed your message and where I am when I viewed it.
BTW -- you can absolutely turn off read receipts across both Facebook and Twitter.
Turning off read receipts doesn't actually turn off read receipts, it just does't show the state to the user. Facebook still knows whether or not my message was read.
At least with email I can block images and prevent the tracking from occurring. I can't do that with facebook or twitter.