Auto renaming of contacts a risk?

[Dio]

Hi,

when a user renames his profile, also the his name automatically changes in the contact list of his contacts.

While at first this seemed to be nice, I now rather think this is an anti-feature because it may allow kinds of impersonification to some extend. This can be used for threads starting from jokes to scam.

In telephone number based messengers the ID usually is bound to the number, which also has a name in the phone’s address book. So the assignment is static.

In Deltachat you can do such things:

Joke: Children in the family rename their profile to their mother’s name and write stuff to their father.

Scam: In a company a bad acting coworker can rename it’s profile to the managers name and write stuff to human ressources or others.

As probably nobody knows the delta chat mail addresses or the public keys of his contacts, the only method of validation is the chat history, which also could be empty when disappearing messages are used.

[ian]

Related:

Override chat group name in local view

Provide a means to rename a group or channel in your roster similarly to how you can change the nick of a user contact to be displayed with higher priority. This is not the same as correcting the group name in the settings, because such edit will be seen by all other members.

Avatar Pics. How to Set?

The topic of requesting to override contact pictures with custom photos seems to be requested often:

[ian]

I think we could protect against this by saving all metadata of a contact after initial scanning them, including their display name, bio and avatar in the override table and forcing to always display these overrides. When any of those change, a button with text to that effect in small print could be displayed next to their name everywhere.

Pressing this button would show a modal to review the before & after information, including the date of adding the contact and the most recent timestamp when the same metadata was broadcast by them and the first time said change was broadcast. The user would then be offered to either update each override table field based on the remote edits, ignore these edits for now or ignore all remote updates for this contact in the future.