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Comment by ceeg | Hacker News Reader

See I'm pro freegan nugget liberating but as you said, definitely anti-this. I had a friend w an IM client in 2010 or so (maybe trillian?) with a plugin that notified him if I opened his profile to chat w him, as well as telling him whether I was really invisible, and finally one that gave a desktop notif if i was typing to him (NOT the typing indicator in a chat window with me).

We were both into computers so he acted like it was a funny/novel piece of tech but he used it in daily life. Felt like stalkerware. You don't stalk your friends, and you don't violate their consent in the same way that friends dont use a patched snapchat client that disables screenshot notifs/keeps photos. Thats creeper shit!!!

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aMSN had this feature because the MSN protocol would establish a connection as soon as a you opened a chat window (before you started typing!) in order to be able to retrieve the display picture from the other user. So you would be able to know that someone opened a chat window but decided against starting to type (or haven't decided quite yet they would want to type).

This is documented in this old FAQ https://github.com/Kjir/amsn/blob/master/amsn/FAQ

(Former aMSN developer)

I admit now this is creepy.

Huh, was msn fetching the profile picture from other perso (p2p?), and not from msn servers?

It was early days for IM and I guess storage was expensive.

Early ICQ didn't even store the contact list on the server so you had different contacts on every PC.

If I recall correctly, this was actually default behavior of one of the multi-IM clients at one point (maybe GAIM?).

It'd be ok if that's the expectation. The social contract is such that both parties have agreed (by using the same client/network that offers those features), so changing it on only one side feels invasive because you had the expectation of privacy that you didn't actually have.

there were options for all these things, yes. i also remember it in a multi im client like gaim or pidgin.

i checked out that "open chat window once someone starts typing" once out of novelty value... but it felt to stalky to keep it active, and wasnt really handy at all. sometimes ppl misclick and open the wrong window and realize later, others are reading past discussions... really not that useful as a feature

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