Privacy preserving rich links

[Simon]

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):

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 contains the link or use a proxy server to hide the ip of the request (telegram does the proxy AFAIK).

2. Problem: Sender privacy

Pulling when sending also can be a problem, for example when the link was shared from browsing with tor and deltachat is running outside of tor.

So I propose that we could detect links and show them in the draft/composer and when the user clicks on them the info is loaded and attached to the outgoing message:

Letting the user decide to do that web request moves the problem out of our responsibility zone.

related forum topics:

• Generate link preview

Places to add it:

• Composer / Message input field
• Sharing activity (since you often share the links from other apps such as browser or YouTube)

[Raiden]

Good idea.
I think this is the best way to implement a link preview in DC.

[november]

This would be a great way to do it. I’d love this.

[Minim]

Nice idea, but maybe make it recursive? By default, fetch only first-party HTML, CSS, and images. This will shed third-party trackers.

If, say, the image is third-party, show the third-party URL and let the user decide whether to click on it. Tracking pixels can be ignored.

Like a simpler version of uBlock Origin.

[bencan]

This is the best proposal I’ve seen so far about this feature.

[Minim]

How to do it, in an email? A bot would work.