[jonknee]

tl;dr iMessage now previews links automatically

> The updated iMessage loads the link preview and in essence clicks the link for you! That’s what irks us with this, the choice. OK we might not stop people clicking links anytime soon but Apple have taken this very choice away from us and facilitate the information leakage. The very act of receiving an SMS message can reveal your rough geographic location, your cellular operator, your current WiFi network.

[spullara]

What makes this more frustrating is that the link previews are a pretty terrible user experience.

[userbinator]

I don't use iMessage but I've noticed this "design pattern" turning up in various other apps, and I hate those bloody things. They're extremely distracting and annoying because they often include "loud" imagery too, when I'm only trying to read the text. I turn them off whenever I can.

[throwanem]

It's an unusual and disappointing error on Apple's part. I wouldn't be surprised to see it corrected in the first iOS 10 update. (And this is why we never install the .0 version of anything, and counsel our friends and loved ones likewise.)

[PhantomGremlin]

never install the .0 version of anything

We're already on 10.0.2, so we've already had a few updates.

[throwanem]

Are we? Go figure - I've been getting the installer popups from Springboard for a while, but I guess it doesn't show minor versions if the major versions differ; it's just been saying "iOS 10", and I took that to mean no patches had been released.

So I suppose I should say rather I would expect to see it corrected in iOS 10.1, at latest.

[JonathonW]

iOS 10.0.1 was the first public release of iOS 10; iOS 10.0.2 was a patch released a couple weeks afterwards fixing some bugs with Photos, app extensions, and the lightning 3.5mm adapter. (10.0 was not released to the public in any form-- probably some critical issue was discovered late in testing after 10.0 had been tagged internally but before the GM seed of 10.0.1 was released to developers.)

This sort of change (fixing link previews) is similar in scope to changes Apple's made in micro (0.0.1) releases before. Whether it happens in a micro release or wait until 10.1 (or even change anything at all) really depends on how important Apple thinks the issue is.

At any rate, I doubt the feature is going away completely (link previews were a flagship iOS 10 feature): at best, I'd expect a "Automatically preview links" checkbox in Settings, just like external image downloads in Mail.

[tombot]

I would have figured Apple proxied the preview to their own URL crawler which could automagically pluck the best preview image, similar to the magic that FB / Slack do when sharing a link. This would mask the IP / Geo and Apple could cache a preview image.

[pfg]

It would also expose any URL you send or receive via iMessage to Apple, whereas messages are otherwise end-to-end encrypted.

[tombot]

ah good point