“Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
1–10 of 69 posts
Re: “Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
#2Plain creepy. Also, does it produce a lot of traffic?
Re: “Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
#3Seems like they need debounce? Most JS utility libraries (lodash, etc) have a debounce function...
Re: “Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
#4Apparently several other messaging apps behave similarly, from the replies in that tweet there were mentions of Facebook Messenger[0] and Telegram[1].
[0]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCRsz7mXUAAEbKK.jpg [1]https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DCSyWs0XcAAQb2N.jpg
Re: “Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
#5On the one hand it provides a greater user-experience if Whatsapp can figure out the URL and preview information about the posted URL (like any social network does today, even we do it at STOMT when you attach an URL to your feedback).
On the other hand i do not get why they send it after every character. Makes it even faster but creates a bunch of unnecessary requests. Not very user friendly. They could do it after they recognize a finished URL (as soon as there is a space). And as pointed out in the tweets it COULD harms the users privacy.
Re: “Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
#6Plain creepy. Also, does it produce a lot of traffic?
Oh ffs, they're just fetching it to render a preview. Have you ever used WhatsApp?
Someone down at HQ is laughing their asses off right now.
Re: “Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
#7In order to produce the link preview, probably. As far as why it's character by character, I don't know, but that doesn't seem very sinister to me. Checking URLs letter by letter is sloppy, especially if you're not even trying to do auto completion, but it doesn't reveal any more information than a complete url could. Anyway, I would think they are expecting people to paste URLs in, not type them.
I've written code to fetch sites and give a preview, for a bookmarking bookmarklet. This involves analyzing the html for title and to select best image to represent the page. That of course necessitates retrieving the page, either through the client or server.
Re: “Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
#8probably whatsapp web version? it adds some kind of description if you send an url: https://i.imgur.com/Rkl2cZJ.png
Re: “Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
#9Re: “Someone was typing in a URL and WhatsApp was fetching it off my server”
#10Plain creepy. Also, does it produce a lot of traffic?
This is a stupid and crappy implementation of a helpful feature, but how is it creepy?