I’m glad EFF is pursuing this. I’m surprised at how much credit people put into these signals without understanding how they work. Especially when vendors interpret signals for me and don’t provide any nuance. So there’s degrees of abstraction that should make information hard to act upon.
On a much lower stakes level, I’ve had coworkers adamantly claim that I read an email because they received a read receipt. Even though I didn’t. It was funny trying to explain that I didn’t read anything and that their signal wasn’t trustworthy, even to the point of finding the email in question and showing it still looking unread. But they believe Outlook more than someone’s direct statements. Even to the point of claiming that I purposely changed my client to show the message as unread after reading.
This wasn’t important so it was more curiosity about how people believe things, but it made me wonder what happens for consequential things.
There really should have been some kind of SLA clause in the contract that specifies the university gets back X% of their quarterly/yearly payment for each false positive they catch.
Gives the vendor a good reason to avoid false positives, and the university a good reason to look for them.
On a much lower stakes level, I’ve had coworkers adamantly claim that I read an email because they received a read receipt. Even though I didn’t. It was funny trying to explain that I didn’t read anything and that their signal wasn’t trustworthy, even to the point of finding the email in question and showing it still looking unread. But they believe Outlook more than someone’s direct statements. Even to the point of claiming that I purposely changed my client to show the message as unread after reading.
This wasn’t important so it was more curiosity about how people believe things, but it made me wonder what happens for consequential things.