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Feature: Option to prevent the scraping of shared links #18330

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hoh opened this issue Dec 10, 2019 · 0 comments
Open

Feature: Option to prevent the scraping of shared links #18330

hoh opened this issue Dec 10, 2019 · 0 comments
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1. to develop Accepted and waiting to be taken care of enhancement feature: sharing

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@hoh
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hoh commented Dec 10, 2019

Context

When sharing a link to a document with a friend over a communication tool such as Facebook Messenger, the document is downloaded by the tool provider and a preview of the document is published in the tool.

Problem

Tool providers, especially spying corporations, scrape the content of the documents users link to. This often goes against the point of using Nextcloud to not share the documents with them.

Desired solution

User: When sharing a link, users have an option to prevent access from scraping/preview bots to access the document linked. Users and/or administrators have an option to enable this by default.

Technically: Nextcloud analyses HTTP headers/ User-Agents of incoming requests and returns an 403 Forbidden error if a bot is detected.

Alternatives considered

Link Password protection: Achieves the expected goal, but has a poor usability when the confidentiality of the documents is low. Users will have to generate a non-trivial password and add it in their message next to the link, else the content will be scraped. Users may also often forget to password-protect the link.

Filter on the reverse proxy: When using a reverse-proxy in front of Nextcloud, system administrators can add filters on the HTTP headers/IP ranges to block the crawlers. However all links are then considered the same, and these rules have to be implemented by every system administrator, for every reverse-proxy (Nginx, Haproxy, Caddy, ...)

@hoh hoh added 0. Needs triage Pending check for reproducibility or if it fits our roadmap enhancement labels Dec 10, 2019
@szaimen szaimen added 1. to develop Accepted and waiting to be taken care of feature: sharing and removed 0. Needs triage Pending check for reproducibility or if it fits our roadmap labels May 27, 2021
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Labels
1. to develop Accepted and waiting to be taken care of enhancement feature: sharing
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