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Cc Hot Wife: Gmail exposes contact names

n8.engineer

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Re: Cc Hot Wife: Gmail exposes contact names

#11

Post by shaftway »

I was bit by this really hard.

At some point in the past, while we were dating, I had my wife's phone and changed my contact name to something far more risqué than "Hot Wife". I called her, she saw it come up, we laughed, she changed it back a few days later.

My primary email address was . But somehow this name got associated with . Google notoriously ignores dots in your email address most of the time, but apparently not all of the time. Google Contacts does all sorts of magic when merging multiple contacts as one. Structurally my wife had two contacts for me with different email addresses, but the UI was merging them into a single display contact. Since we used the form with the dot in it, nobody noticed....

... until about 10 years later. We were now married, had kids, and we're in the process of interviewing to hire an au pair (a live-in, foreign exchange nanny). My wife emailed a prospective au pair, the agency, and CCed me, but fat fingered the email address without the dot.

We were dropped by the au pair agency and had to go with a different one.

Re: Cc Hot Wife: Gmail exposes contact names

#12

Post by kaikai »

bityard wrote: post #5
CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #3

I can see how this might be surprising for people, but it's also basically how email has always worked -- so it's a bit weird to ding Gmail for it. The address book would need to have two entries for names: one for you to type as a shortcut, and one to put on the outgoing message.

I'm trying to work out how the author came to the presumption that contact names would ever be private. As in, what other software are they using where that would be a standard feature? The closest I can come to is _maybe_ SMS where names never transit the system, only the phone numbers. So whatever name you associate to a number in your phone stays in your phone. Email has certainly never worked that way.

My phone is how I track most of my contacts, so it makes sense to me that someone would assume email contacts work the same way.

I’ve was surprised by an email that revealed my saved contact name recently, and I used to work for an email company.

Re: Cc Hot Wife: Gmail exposes contact names

#14

Post by marssaxman »

shaftway wrote: post #11

I was bit by this really hard. At some point in the past, while we were dating, I had my wife's phone and changed my contact name to something far more risqué than "Hot Wife". I called her, she saw it come up, we laughed, she changed it back a few days later. My primary email address was . But somehow this name got associated with . Google notoriously ignores dots in your email address most of the time, but apparentl…

Thank you for sharing this retrospectively hilarious story.

Re: Cc Hot Wife: Gmail exposes contact names

#15

Post by marssaxman »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #3

I can see how this might be surprising for people, but it's also basically how email has always worked -- so it's a bit weird to ding Gmail for it. The address book would need to have two entries for names: one for you to type as a shortcut, and one to put on the outgoing message.

It's always interesting when you get a glimpse into a foreign way of thinking about the world. It makes sense that someone for whom email has always been a process of interacting with a website might not realize that the "to" line is really just a free-form text field, and that all apparent structure is being applied ad-hoc by the client. But are you even thinking about email as something which has a client, if you're using GMail? I can see how it would be reasonable to imagine that the big mystery machine which appears to control the whole process would have some master database of email addresses in it somewhere.

Re: Cc Hot Wife: Gmail exposes contact names

#16

Post by d1ss0nanz »

People come from mobile contact apps, where it's normal to call contacts "Mother of ", "Sara Mobile New 2025", or "Hot Wife". Now "unified messaging" tries to blur the lines between technologies and I completely understand that people expect that only the necessary information (the email address) is leaving their devices. So maybe it's time to change the default behavior of email clients?

Re: Cc Hot Wife: Gmail exposes contact names

#17

Post by atesti »

Related: If you send an e-mail to "Some Name with something interesting" and company.org runs Microsoft Exchange and a.person@company.org is in Active Directory, then Exchange will erase "Some Name with something interesting" and replace it with a pointer to Active Directory and you will never see "Some Name with something interesting".

Like the opposite effect as discussed here. o365 is probably doing the same

Re: Cc Hot Wife: Gmail exposes contact names

#18

Post by VogonPoetry »

The vCard RFC 6350 includes the property "nickname". Apple's "Contacts" uses this standard. You can use "nickname" for searching and in my testing the "First Last" fields are used when sending email. The nickname is what is displayed in iMessage and when receiving a call.

Re: Cc Hot Wife: Gmail exposes contact names

#19

Post by n4r9 »

bityard wrote: post #5
CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #3

I can see how this might be surprising for people, but it's also basically how email has always worked -- so it's a bit weird to ding Gmail for it. The address book would need to have two entries for names: one for you to type as a shortcut, and one to put on the outgoing message.

I'm trying to work out how the author came to the presumption that contact names would ever be private. As in, what other software are they using where that would be a standard feature? The closest I can come to is _maybe_ SMS where names never transit the system, only the phone numbers. So whatever name you associate to a number in your phone stays in your phone. Email has certainly never worked that way.

> what other software are they using where that would be a standard feature?

In WhatsApp I can give a contact name to a number but I don't believe anyone else sees it. Even if I tag them using @ in a group chat - I suspect that everyone just sees the name that they've set for that contact.

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