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Comment by nhchris | Hacker News Reader

Something to keep in mind when accusing people of overreacting to "minor" data leaks, such as a little extra metadata here, some telemetry there... they add up. And one day, you might have to do something actually important, and there will be all these little landmines lying around.

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We need a return to WYSIWYG principles. Any metadata stored in a file should be shown to the user in some way, to make them aware of that metadata existing. And if the metadata is incomprehensible to the user, then maybe it shouldn't be stored at all. There shouldn't be any surprises. If a file has an embedded thumbnail preview of itself which could become out of sync with the main image data, both should be shown to the user so they have an opportunity to notice it.

That's a bit of a weird use of WYSIWYG, which is usually used to mean that you can't see the metadata. For example, imagine you're editing a WYSIWYG document and enter:

    A
    Ctrl+I
    Enter
    Ctrl+I
    B

This will look like:

    A

    B

If you later start typing on that intermediate line, though, your text will be in italics. This is what users expect, and is in contrast to outting a little "italics" markup symbol on the line, as people did pre-WYSIWYG or do today in Markdown, HTML, and other markup languages.

Even “plain text” includes hidden metadata

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byte_order_mark

The phrase "death by a thousand paper cuts" comes to mind.

A random example I realized the other day: your Android phone has a record of exactly what app was active at what time. Even if you delete both the app and whatever documents you were working on, the log of you using it still persists. And that bit is user-accessible in the UI (at least on modern Android) - system logs probably have much more.

And then, the app use information is also independently stored on your Google account. For your convenience. So even if you flush your phone down the toilet and get a new one, the information remains. Even if you wipe your Google account, organizations with enough pull (e.g. governments) could get at it.

And don't get me started on battery level / charging status or what WiFi networks were seen when.

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