Generate link preview

[peppa]

@Low

4. If you’re pasting a link, that means that you’ve already been to the website yourself. So what is the issue with generating the link preview yourself for everyone else?

There are multiple issues with this. Here are links to some replies in the discussion above which answer your question:

Generate link preview

one aspect of my proposal was to not make any web requests until the user requested them. That increases privacy when sharing links by making the preview opt-in. It’s not a given that always you want those previews, for sites like GitHub they are boring and not always helpful, so in the messengers with link previews I quite often need to remove the embeds/previews. Although I want to have them for social media, blogs, youtube and audio streaming platforms. EDIT: this was my personal opinion, …

Generate link preview

For me the messages of these bots in group chats are useless waste of internet traffic and screen space. And even when I block the bots, I still see their messages. It would be nice to have the ability to not download such mails from the server.

Generate link preview

I almost never want previews. I avoid programs that automatically download stuff without an explicit request, partly because this sort of functionality is pushed by companies that make their money out of tracking me. An ignorable popup to add a preview might be okay (if it couldn’t be hit by accident), but if I just keep typing I really don’t want it to be fetching web content. Apart from anything else, there will be false positives on link detection. I want to know when what I type is public, …

Generate link preview

Nice idea, but there are hidden traps in the context of user tracking. If user set up SOCKS proxy for account - should this HTTP request for dog’s web page be sent from local IP address by default route, or through proxy? What if proxy and mail server are the same host? What if user’s browser, in which that dog’s page was opened initially, was accessing internet via same/another proxy? And how DNS leaks will be prevented?

Generate link preview

Obviously preventing people from sending or visiting URLs is a poor choice, and obviously some people want previews. Security isn’t stopping people from doing things, or even stopping them from doing insecure things; it’s stopping them from doing insecure things by accident or needlessly. @9er is right that this would need careful integration with existing functionality like proxying. A bot sort of does this; @Leanderl, does adding a preview bot to your chat not work for you?

Simon’s proposal for privacy preserving rich links also addresses this:

Privacy preserving rich links

Discord, telegram, WhatsApp, twitter, mastodon, Facebook and co all show a link preview which is pulled from special meta tags (“open graph meta tags” is their name, here is a list of them: Complete List of HTML Meta Tags · GitHub): [Bildschirmfoto 2022-07-17 um 16.40.38] 1. Problem: Recipient privacy The potential privacy problem is when doing pulling the data on the receiving site, a web request is made from the device. So the obvious solution is to send the meta-data with the message that…