Throughout the Decoder interview, Mehrotra makes a series of moves that all follow the same logic: every time Patel confronts him with a problem of consent, Mehrotra reframes it as a problem of quality. The feature was bad. The team missed. The execution fell short. What he never says, not once in the entire conversation, is that they shouldn’t have used people’s names without asking.

Patel asks how many people at Superhuman worked on Expert Review. Mehrotra’s answer: “It was a small team. It was probably a product manager and a couple engineers.” He says he personally hadn’t spent any time looking at the feature before the backlash hit. This is meant to contain the damage, to make it sound like a minor project that slipped through. But think about what it actually tells you. Superhuman has about 1,500 employees. A team built a feature that used hundreds of real people’s names and likenesses to sell a subscription product. It was live for seven months. And nobody, in a company of 1,500, flagged it. Nobody in the chain between “a couple engineers” and launch day said, “Hey, should we ask these people first?” A rogue team gets fired. This team didn’t get flagged, because there was nothing to flag. Using someone’s identity without their knowledge was just how things worked.