'The Superhuman controversy from earlier this month, in which a former Silicon Valley exec blew the lid off a series of controversial email surveillance tools offered by the up-and-coming startup, has prompted a bit of soul searching among those in the tech industry. But in twisted fashion, the public blasting of a company like Superhuman has been the tech equivalent of opening Pandora’s Box, unearthing all sorts of free and easily available tools that have done this for years and can be employed by anyone with just the tiniest shred of tech savvy. For instance, an open source, Python-based web tool called Supertracker has popped up on Github, courtesy of Delian Asparouhov, an investor with the venture capital firm Founder’s Fund. It lets anyone create their own tracking pixel, coyly disguised as either a transparent image, an image of the pokémon pikachu, or a not-so-subtle magnifying glass. Creating it is as easy as inputting a user name, picking a tracking pixel image, and hitting the enter key. From there, you can save the image, paste it in the body of any email, and send it off. Whoever opens it will have the when and even the where transmitted back to you. Of course, you can do similar styles of tracking with any number of available Superhuman competitors and browser extensions. But Asparouhov’s tool has the added benefit of walking you through the process step by step and laying out just how simple it is to siphon away this kind of sensitive info with a few simple lines of code. (He also outlines some good defenses against this type of surveillance.) ' -- source: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/19/20700843 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/