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Comment by afandian | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand. They are redirecting to their own S3 bucket, so who would be the recipient of the leak?

Also, isn't this what Referrer-Policy is for? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

Quoting web standards, you are more optimistic than I am, unfortunately, nobody uses them consistently or accurately (look at PUT vs POST for create / update as a really good example of this - nobody agrees) its a shame too, there's a lot of richness to the web spec. Most people don't even use "HEAD" to ensure they aren't making wasteful REST calls if they already have the data.

I was replying to

> All the big products put an intermediary for that reason

Surely whoever maintains the big products can add headers if they want?

And this is about people who care enough about not showing up in Referer headers to do something about it rather than people in general not understanding the full spec .

The other problem is if you're too big like Google, you cannot assume everyone will honor this, which is why they do these redirects.

Referrer-Policy is a response header, so in this case it would be Google sending it, and the browsers who would be honouring it. You have to hope that the browser makers get it correct... Unless I misunderstood?

I worked on these big web products before and the answer then was that no, you couldn't trust it to be honored and it would have been considered a privacy incident so better off just having the redirect and having no risk. You can't trust the useragents for example.

Not sure if the reliability of the intentional mechanism has improved enough where this is just legacy or if there's entirely new reasons for it in 2026.

Blogger predates the existence of this header by many years. Blogger, I believe, has also been in maintenance mode for many years.

It sees periodic major updates to keep it in line with standards. That's not much more than maintenance mode, but it's more than just keeping the servers running. It seems like someone at Google pays attention to it and keeps it from falling behind, but I suspect the same was true of Google Reader until it wasn't.

>someone at Google pays attention to it and keeps it from falling behind

I feel like it's the same for Google My Maps. They even discontinued the Android app, so you can only use it on the web. It totally feels like there's a single guy keeping the whole system up.

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