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Comment by thayne | Hacker News Reader

There is a big difference between deleting when disk storage is low, and deleting if you haven't opened the app in 14 days.

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Yes, but they are both symptoms of the same problem. Ultimately as a PWA developer I'd love to just be able to save a file to disk and be able to rely on it the same as a native app can.

And currently there are also other situations where browsers will delete your data, in addition to low disk space and the weird iOS usage requirements.

Yes, but that is also the difference between it being used as a replacement for tracking cookies. There’s a reason why every browser not made by an ad network is more concerned about privacy.

How would it be used as a replacement for tracking cookies? The data is only accessible from a single origin (hence the name Origin private file system).

This feature can actually benefit privacy, because it allows creating web apps that don't have to send data back to a server to store it.

It’s a potential long-term persistent identifier. Safari already deletes first-party cookies from sites you don’t regularly access so they need to review any other storage mechanism to ensure it doesn’t turn into a replacement with different policies. That’s also why they have a different policy for a PWA, where the user has expressed a stronger intention to use that site regularly.

In this case, they implemented it following the same storage standard for everything to avoid inconsistencies.

https://storage.spec.whatwg.org/

> This feature can actually benefit privacy, because it allows creating web apps that don't have to send data back to a server to store it.

It’s more convenient in some cases than the other APIs for doing that, but it’s held to the same privacy policies. If you want persistent storage, you have to ask the user for it.

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