Thread · 4 tweets · 13 Jan 2021

Yeah I have thoughts: burn it with fucking fire then salt the earth with plutonium waste 😘 A core tenet of the Web is trust, and the fundamental idea behind capturing and using email in this way for ad targeting is a violation of trust.

It's not going to be "please give us your email address so we can give you a better ad experience" (because users know better), it'll be "here's a regiwall for no reason" and users will just use SSO to get past it because they're used to it, without really consenting.

Then the site will turn around and betray the user's trust by sharing it with poor protection (hashing which can be reversed, if only because of the scale). Eventually, this will destroy our ability to rely on email for legitimate uses.

I'm thinking about a proposal to get rid of email entirely on the Web, it's a bit of a long shot but we need to get there. Cross-context tracking is dead, period.