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by jkaptur 1575 days ago
I've been thinking a lot about this for https://www.diffdiff.net. After convenience, privacy is the core of the value proposition - the text to diff doesn't get sent to the server.

On the other hand, though, if you want to publish/share a diff, then, you know, privacy is the core of the value proposition, so you probably don't want to share it with the whole world, much less let the whole world edit or delete it!

It's possible to design a scheme with hard-to-guess URLs, URL parameters with "secret edit tokens" and so on, but that feels hard to use and different from how other sites work.

I'm quite torn.

2 comments

The way mega.nz works is the sharable url contains a decryption key in the hash. The server only sees encrypted data, the client requests that data then decrypts it. This design ensures they have no ability to see user content, while still enabling users to share links on the web.
They still have the ability to see user content, but it would require them to make a change to their codebase. If they did such a change silently...
just like whatsapp encryption
What if you embedded the diff in the html link itself, like PlantUML does for their web version?