Just days after email startup Superhuman was embroiled in controversy over its use of tracking pixels that let users see when and even where recipients opened their emails, company CEO Rahul Vohra is thoroughly apologizing — and promising to change his company.
Effective immediately, he writes, Superhuman will stop tracking location, will delete existing location information, and will turn off read receipts by default.
“I have come to understand that there are indeed nightmare scenarios involving location tracking,” writes Vohra, adding later: “I wholeheartedly apologize for not thinking through this more fully.”
Here is Vohras official blog post, and some additional apology in his tweets:
2/ I know I have come under fire for being quiet. I had to take the time to think deeply and from first principles. I hope our community will understand that.
— Rahul Vohra (@rahulvohra) July 3, 2019
4/ We are making some big changes to @Superhuman. We are:
• removing location tracking
• deleting location data
• turning read statuses off by default
• building an option to disable remote imagesPlease see https://t.co/T5YekM2iyM
I've written this in detail there
— Rahul Vohra (@rahulvohra) July 3, 2019
Vohras apology post is remarkable in that it tackles many of the concerns leveled at read receipts head-on. He admits that Superhuman was using pixel trackers, spells out how they work, admits they could have been abused by bad actors, and generally doesnt come across as particularly defensive.
“It made sense for read statuses to be on by default when our user base was early adopters,” he writes. Now that the company has realized theyd come as a surprise even to Superhuman users, theyll be off by default instead.
The companys response is also a bit surprising considering how Superhumans use of pixel tracking isnt all that unusual. While a viral blog post from former Twitter VP Mike Davidson thrust Superhuman into the spotlight for secretly tracking email recipients by default (a prominent New York Times article also didnt hurt), its hardly the only email app that uses pixel tracking to quietly spy on whether or not youve opened an email, nor even the only one to tell users where you were when you opened it.
Which is also probably why the company isnt getting rid of pixel tracking for good. Heres the paragraph where Vohra justifies the decision to keep read receipts around:
We are still keeping the feature, as Superhuman is business software for email power users. In the prosumer email market, read statuses have been “must have” for many years. See MixMax, Yesware, Streak, Hubspot, and Mailtrack. These products alone have 3M+ users, and each one provides read statuses by default.
“In our market, the demand for read statuses is so high that it has now become table-stakes,” he adds.
So theyre not going away, but they will be opt-in — at least on the part of Superhuman users. Recipients
