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If an open standard has features that violate user privacy and don't provide sufficient value in exchange to justify it, it's reasonable to discuss violating or reforming that standard for the sake of privacy. The existence of a standard doesn't make the privacy issue go away.

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Note that per the report GNU wget does this as well. So other well known, well regarded, widely used tools are following this same standard doing the same thing.

That doesn't excuse the standard, but it does mean Chromium is just matching platform on this, not setting any particular policy on its own.

My beef is with the adverb "secretly".

I don't have an issue with this feature, but to play devil's advocate: it obviously isn't being adequately advertised if it's surprising to so many people on HN. And if many among the audience of HN find it surprising, you can be certain it's even more-so to the general public.

Since the behavior is unexpected and very non-obvious for the average user, I don't see any issue with calling it "secretly".

You confused secrecy with ignorance.

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