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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

> Browsing information like history, bookmarked sites, and cookies isn’t accessible to third-party browsers on Android.

As a user, why the hell do I want third party applications to be able to access my browser's history, bookmarked sites, and cookies?

That's an obvious privacy leak!

Firefox can have that data when it's generated by Firefox while I'm using Firefox and not in other contexts.

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>As a user, why the hell do I want third party applications to be able to access my browser's history, bookmarked sites, and cookies?

>That's an obvious privacy leak!

No it's not. It's only a leak if they access that data without your permission. There's nothing wrong with them being able to request that data, with you-the-user being able to respond to that request "fuck no".

Better than that, add an export feature to Safari that must be activated by a user action. That would probably be in the spirit of GDPR's right to access one's own data.

As a user who wants to easily migrate to a new browser, I would like the new browser to have access to the old browsers bookmarks etc to make the process easier.

You'd implement that as an export from the old browser though - that way it's an explicit "yes, please" from the user allowing the new browser access rather than allowing holes that nefarious people will exploit.

Yes, and an export from the old browser would count as "making it accessible to other browsers".

But that's not possible, hence it being listed among the issues.

This is mostly for importing to/from other browsers. It’s a very common operation for onboarding.

One way to accomplish this that doesn’t make it easy for unscrupulous apps to suck up browser data is for the OS or stock browser to be able to export an archive of user data that Firefox (or other browsers) could then import. Adds a bit of friction but much more difficult to abuse.

There are two problems with that: 1) Mobile users don’t know how to use files 2) Where do you export it? If you put it in one of the shared folders now the unencrypted archive of all user’s data is just sitting in a folder that many unrelated apps can access.

Make a standardized file type for web data archives, which then allows other browsers (which can open it) to show up in a share sheet that shows up when the user taps an export button.

This sends the file directly to the other browser which can then do as it pleases with the data. No filesystem knowledge required, and share sheets are common mobile user knowledge.

The problem is that the question of what is a "browser" is an easy question for humans to answer but doesn't line up to software.

The short story is that the permission model would have to be changed; they have to add an Android permission for sharing browsing data that apps would have to declare and users would have to opt into. And of course that increases the risk surface area; We know from past examples that malicious apps sneak through (or non-malicious apps previously signed off on end up purchased by someone else and become malicious) and users really don't understand security.

The state is extractable via Google take out and the safest solution might honestly be to not support this directly on Android and instead require Mozilla to figure out how to import a takeout archive via the cloud.

This is better than nothing but in practice will be rarely used if the flow has to be initiated by user (from some deep menu and in a different app than the one they want to use).

For history and cookies it's definitely objectable, but it's essential that the bookmarks be exportable and reimportable.

Something that Firefox on Android doesn't support, by the way :facepalm: https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/issues/417

I think this is disingenuous. we can already import contacts and other sensitive data with no "privacy leak". they're not requiring unvetted import functionality, from the issue:

  Android is able to mediate access to other sensitive data with user consent.

Yeah, but that means all major browsers agreeing on a standard, and we all know how that goes.

Doesn't have to be all major browsers. Android itself can mediate this. we already have that for other types of data. apps can request to read SMS or your contacts, these are called `ContentProvider`s.

I agree. The justification "but desktop operating systems let us do it" means nothing to me because desktop operating systems are known for having bad security. It only works on those systems because there is no security for programs reading each other's data.

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