Embedding links

@jsick’s use of SpeakerDeck to embed his slides caused my browser to try to connect to Twitter, FaceBook, New Relic, and FeedsPortal. How much embedding should we allow as opposed to links that a user can choose to follow (or not)? How much control do we have over this?

My $.02:

FWIW, I found this particular case helpful; I could quickly see what’s being linked to (and flip through the entire presentation). I share the concerns about privacy implications, but I worry that battle has already been largely lost in the age of mashups and X-as-a-service business models. We’d lose functionality, w/o significantly reducing one’s cross-section for online tracking (IMHO).

Are you seeing this with a tracker-blocker like ghostery? Well, we can have a discussion about this and how much we want to strive to keep the community tracker-free. The only setting I know of to control iframe embedding like I did for the SpeakerDeck slides is a ‘onebox domains whitelist’ setting:

That said, I only added a link to the SpeakerDeck page in my post and the iframe-ing was done automatically…

tl;dr I don’t know of a technical way to prevent SpeakerDeck iframes, and the like. I’m also personally fine with that level of tracking code if it permits a good user experience. I’m open to discussion if we should have a moderation policy against any sort of iframe embedding.

Just putting some text in front of the link prevents the iframe-ing/“onebox”: https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-a-onebox/4546

versus

https://meta.discourse.org/t/what-is-a-onebox/4546

As a recent convert to Ghostery, it’s really not all about privacy. I find that the reliability and speed of browsing has gone way up, too.

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