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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

on the theme of Rapportive: I played today with it to build an HN raplet and I realized something slightly scary: whenever I installs rapportive, or any raplet, all of my contacts's email addresses get broadcasted to the builders of the raplets plainly.

Was this discussed previously on HN, or on some of the Rapportive public comunications? It seems a moderately bad thing to me, although I have not pondered the alternatives (hash a-la gravatar for example).

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This is why we have a big warning when you install a Raplet — you are trusting the authors of the Raplet to treat your email addresses with respect. This is why we only list Raplets in the gallery from authors we know and trust.

A hash would work for many use cases, but wouldn't work for adding a contact to a CRM/Helpdesk/etc.

Access to the plaintext email addresses could be a permission that Raplets ask for, but this may be unnecessary complication.

true, the warning is there for me whan I install my raplet, but it's not for when my contacts do, which would be the discomforting bit. As I said, I did not put much thought on this anyway, and I can see how this is basically "your friends know your email and can sign you up to a spammy ml" in another form.

Re HN Raplet - I'd be eager to try that out. Got a link?

not yet, but if you want I'll let you know when I have something decent.

Mind you, since HN does not show emails, and I do not run the site, this only works hackishly and lacks the exactness of "real" raplets.

Sure, Raplets are tricky when you can't search by email. We're thinking of a few ways to improve this though.

Please do send me details when you're ready - email's in my HN bio.

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