user: new-hires

0 karma | created 6 years ago

RE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19826211

With a changing of the guard, the honor system can handily disappear. We saw this transpire with the burying of the JavaScript toggle. A new guy showed up, and decided that disabling JavaScript was “an advanced feature” and just too dangerous for ordinary folk. [1, 2]

Of course it begins with good intentions, and promises to leave explicit privacy options alone, but new devs show up with different opinion and the old devs are gone, and suddenly privacy options are getting toggled any old time.

Beyond even that, we all know that the realities of privacy are never ever cut and dry. Leaky details can expose people in peculiar ways. Fingerprinting preferences and hardware facts for forensic purposes has taught us that much. Viewport size, OS, connection speed, graphics capabilities, hardware acceleration profiles. Even stylometry, choice of words, manner of speech can give people away. In that sense, exposing any user choices might prove to compromise identity to some degree.

1. https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=873709

2. https://limi.net/checkboxes-that-kill/ (seriously breathless persuasive writing about how urgent it is to hide the toggle for javascript, among other things, but make no mistake, the high value target was the javascript checkbox)

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