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It's clearly still sending the link, just their service isn't generating the thumbnail, perhaps blocked from their internal network.

I'm fact I had always assumed those are generated by the local application

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The link preview is generated locally, but Whatsapp blacklists domains it doesn't want previews to be generated for by marking them as 'bad domains' in the app. It did this for telegram a few years ago, and an analysis of the android app's source code proved it was intentional.

https://www.androidpolice.com/2016/09/09/whatsapp-is-blockin...

That would be a very easy way of getting someones IP address with near zero interaction.

iMessage works around this by generating the preview on the sender's side.

How? The user is sharing the link he already has. IP is already exposed via the browser which he just viewed the link on.

The preview is generated and sent along with the message. Nothing is loaded from the other chats' side.

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