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Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

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Re: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

#121

Post by dspillett »

mschoening wrote: post #75

Hi, this is Max from Notion. First: This is documented and we also warn users when they publish a page. But, that’s not good enough! Second: We don’t like this and are looking at ways to fix this either by removing the PII from the public endpoints or by replacing it with an email proxy similar to GitHub’s equivalent functionality for public commits. P.S: Some folks here have speculated that this should be a 1 minute…

> P.S: Some folks here have speculated that this should be a 1 minute fix. Unfortunately that is not the case. :(

Ignoring the “the bug was raised four years ago” part and assuming you just mean it isn't as easy as that and might break other things: what other things could resolving this potentially break? If the issue is that the PII needs to be present for private/authenticated views, would not making it unavailable everywhere including there, and fixing that later, be the better option over leaving the PII present for public views for a second longer?

Re: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

#122

Post by Pi9h »

bryanhogan wrote: post #119
Pi9h wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m building Docmost, a self-hosted alternative to Notion and Confluence. It’s open-source, easy to self-host and feature-packed. GitHub: https://github.com/docmost/docmost .

I'm not sure DocMost is a Notion alternative, it's just a note-taking tool without many of the features that give Notion its unique position. I'm always disappointed by note-taking tools calling themselves a Notion alternative when they do not provide an alternative to Notion and are instead just another note-taking tool with a simple UI. If you want to be a Notion alternative provide the things that make Notion grea…

Perhaps try it first before dismissing it as just a “note-taking tool,” which it isn’t.

We have support for team-spaces, permissions, diagrams, real-time collaboration, comments, page verification workflows, AI, SSO/LDAP, search, audit logs, API, public sharing, and a lot more.

Btw, we have plans to introduce a database-like feature.

Re: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

#123

Post by varenc »

reactordev wrote: post #81
varenc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing it's not trivial to fix without breaking other things? The weakness seems to be that anyone can turn UUIDs into details like email. But I assume this functionality is necessary for other flows so they can't just turn off all UUID->email/profile look ups. And similarly hiding author UUIDs on posts also isn't trivial. Conceptually, I agree it should be easy, but I suspect they're stuck with legacy code and…

This is a rendering artifact, nothing more. If you can tokenize and protect PII on your platform, you can protect PII on your public pages. if (metadata.is_public) Simple fix.

But a user's email isn't always forbidden. The API endpoint which turns UUIDs into a user email presumably also has use cases where you do want to expose the user email. For example, when seeing a list of people you've already invited via email to collaborate with, or listing users within your organization, etc. So a user's email isn't always forbidden PII, it depends on the context.

The trouble is the UUID->email endpoint has no idea what the context is and that endpoint alone can't decide if it should expose email or not. And then public Notion docs publicly expose author UUIDs.

Their mistake was architecting things this way. From day 1 they should have cleanly separated public identifiers from privileged ones. Or have more bespoke endpoints for looking up a UUID's email for each of the narrow contexts in which this is allowed. They didn't do this, and they certainly should have, but fixing this mess is likely a non-trivial amount of work. Though I bet it could be done immediately if they really cared and didn't mind other things breaking.

I'm absolutely not defending their choice to expose emails in this way. They should have addressed this years ago when it was first reported, and I want them shamed for failing to care. But just trying to say it's likely not a one line fix.

Re: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

#124

Post by knome »

hluska wrote: post #107
knome wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the answer to that is a functional social safety net for the innocent employees to land in, not allowing companies to violate the law with impunity.

First off, adults use capital letters. I know it’s hard but it’s a basic part of our language. I would respect you and your arguments more if you used them. Second, your idea is as naive as your writing is poor. The issue with AA was that accounting doesn’t provide a lot of bounce and recover space for people whose firms go belly up in the way that AA did. A social safety net has precisely zero to do with the loss of…

and I might respect your opinions if they weren't couched in vapid complaints over the formatting of casual online intercourse. nobody with an argument of substance starts off with a complaint on the casing of someone's statement.

if true, your claim of the inability of the financial worker sector to absorb masses of workers dumped from a company going under due to fraud committed by the company sounds like exactly something that a social safety net would assist with, giving the workers a larger space to safely transition from one position to another.

an emotional appeal to insist on allowing a company engaged in criminal acts to persist because it might have a negative impact on those working for it isn't logical. if the company valued its employees, it shouldn't have engaged in fraud and been folded under as it deserved.

Re: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

#126

Post by skissane »

I really dislike Notion. Its public API is full of bizarre arbitrary limitations, like a rich text database field can only contain max 100 “child blocks”, where each change in formatting consumes one child block-but its web UI doesn’t have this issue. Yes, I realise the undocumented private API that the web UI uses doesn’t have this issue either-but I shouldn’t have to, and I haven’t.

I don’t love Confluence, but at least it doesn’t do this to me.

Re: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

#127

Post by csallen »

markdown wrote: post #115
csallen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole point of that comment is that it's not that easy. There are potential side effects and consequences that are difficult to architect around.

Except it is. If you can't easily architect around it, then don't do what you're trying to do. "Oh I needed to disclose user data in order to make more money" isn't an acceptable excuse.

No one's talking about excuses.

Re: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

#129

Post by steve1977 »

coliveira wrote: post #80
steve1977 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A terrorist works with terror (fear). Also at least in democracies you can reject the government without physical violence.

> in democracies you can reject the government No, you cannot. You can reject the current party, but the government is much more than that. In the US, for example, the government is a set of institutions that were put in power in the American revolution. If you try to reject this your own life is at risk.

Maybe the US is not a real democracy then?

Re: Notion leaks email addresses of all editors of any public page

#130

Post by gib444 »

andrelaszlo wrote: post #102
mschoening wrote: post #75

Hi, this is Max from Notion. First: This is documented and we also warn users when they publish a page. But, that’s not good enough! Second: We don’t like this and are looking at ways to fix this either by removing the PII from the public endpoints or by replacing it with an email proxy similar to GitHub’s equivalent functionality for public commits. P.S: Some folks here have speculated that this should be a 1 minute…

While you're here, why is Notion so slow on Firefox? I mean extremely slow.

The answer is usually that the devs only use Chrome.
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