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Comment by cottsak | Hacker News Reader

How does a potential customer know how effective this is? How do you even know that it's effective for your personal use case as described https://urlcanary.com/about ?

How many attackers are going to click that link or any link for that matter? Seems the value prop of the product is based on the assumption that folks will click. Maybe it's a solid assumption. I just can't see the evidence for it.

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The value lies in sometimes demonstrating a channel is insecure. It won't always do so. Obviously the converse--proving a channel is secure--is much harder.

I don't think it has commercial value really. But for social awareness, showing that mail, or notes, or storage providers aren't always as private as you'd hope, that's where the value is.

But it demonstrates nothing if no one clicks. The channel may be insecure, compromised and no one knows - not the author or the parties who are supposed to have the secrets.

I see what he's trying to do, but this isn't the way I don't think. Mathematical proofs that verify that a payload is observed, opened, or accessed work. They are deterministic. They are also way more complex. I think this is trying to solve a problem in a simple way but it's still just as nondeterministic as without this solution IMO.

Absolutely. But if you have the choice between a) not knowing 100 pct of the time, and b) knowing for certain it's not private X pct of the time, for unknown X probably not 0, you'd want b. You will have more information by trying.

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