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Comment by vel0city | Hacker News Reader

You can disable the auto-download. Settings > Data and storage > Media auto-download, you can choose what to auto download for mobile data/wifi/roaming.

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Thank you! That's what I get for quick scrolling through the settings. I for sure thought it would have been under Privacy (for this concern), but that makes sense too.

So, just to confirm my understanding, if one goes into those settings and disables all auto-download, that helps- but, then a user will manually download images, correct? Are they still vulnerable to this issue then at that time?

A user might download images and yes, if they download images Cloudflare will show which datacenters have cached that image. They might also install an APK you give them or run that taylor_swift_concert.mp4.exe as well.

If I host an image on Cloudflare and put the URL here, I'll know which CF datacenters are near HN users who bother clicking the link as well.

Ah I made the same mistake.

Whatsapp has this option and I'm pretty sure it is in privacy settings.

hmm. I find the auto-download setting in the mobile app but not on desktop (mac). anyone know?

(some comments seem to suggest that the desktop app always auto-downloads)

it looks like it can’t be disabled for view-once media (or at least, that’s what the settings screen says)

I wonder if view-once media is even handled the same way as a regular attachment (using CF) or is sent more like a regular message.

I imagine if one really wanted it to be view-once, it wouldn't go to a CDN.

Thanks for pointing this out!

I think view-once media there means media hosted on signal servers, not remote servers? But not entirely sure.

I'd love a hard answer to this if anyone knows or has time to look at the source code.

https://github.com/signalapp

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