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Since creating SpaceHey, privacy has always been an important aspect for me. I'm always trying to make SpaceHey as privacy-friendly as possible, and today I want to take this a step further.
Private Profiles
This is a feature at lot of you have been asking for: Private profiles! Starting today, you can visit your Account Settings and set your Profile to "Private". This will only allow your Friends (which you have to approve) to view your Profile page and view and write comments on your Profile. Everyone else won't be able to visit your Profile and will have to send you a Friend-Request first.
External Media
As many of you know, you can embed external images, css, fonts and more on your custom SpaceHey profiles and layouts. This is a big aspect of what makes custom SpaceHey profiles so unique and fun - however, this external content could potentially - depending on where the external content is coming from - track visitors, which isn't perfect for the privacy of the visitors. That's what I want to fix today: Starting today, visitors of custom SpaceHey profiles won't connect to any 3rd-party servers anymore - even when the profile loads external media. This works by routing all external media through SpaceHey servers. That way the 3rd-party media provider can technically only "see" a request from a generic SpaceHey server, not from individual visitors. And the best part: you probably don't need to change anything for this to work - it's all done behind the scenes automatically! (If there should however occur issues when loading certain external content, please let me know so I can fix it!)
Unfortunately, one thing this update affects, is embedded audio and video content with the HTML
<audio> and <video> Tags in your Layouts. Sorry about that :( Instead, please use YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, Spotify, or one of the other supported Embed providers - there are a lot of great Blog Entries on how to do this on the SpaceHey Blog!
3rd-party Embeds
As you may know, you can embed 3rd-party Embeds from a handful of popular sites (like YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, and more) on your profiles, blog entries and forum topics. However, this 3rd-party content is coming from, well, 3rd-parties, and they could track visitors when a page with an Embed is loaded. Starting today, you will be asked once if you want to load Embeds from a specific site before it loads. After that, your decision will be saved and content from that source will be loaded immediately in the future. While this extra-step may annoy some of us, it is necessary to ensure a privacy-friendly experience across SpaceHey - and again, you should only see it once if you agree.
I'm really excited about these changes which improve the privacy of everyone on SpaceHey. If you have any questions, suggestions, ideas or find a bug, please let me know in the comments or via email: support@spacehey.com
Thank you so much for being on SpaceHey! :)
An
Update: As many of you have reported, this update broke autoplaying YouTube and Mixcloud embeds. This was not planned and it should be fixed now, sorry!! If you find any other bugs, please let me know!
Comments
Displaying 20 of 46 comments ( View all | Add Comment )
temporary
It's so refreshing to be part of a platform without having to be worried about privacy and data collection. You're doing incredible work man!
Theo
The external media on my page doesn't load anymore? Any idea how to fix this?
DART12
epic, atleast we are fine from facebook creeps
Kitchen Staff
Epic update.
Christian Poetry Books
TY
Token Skylark
An, I sent you a email regarding verification. Can you verify my account please?
「Ｂｌａｃｋ Ｗｉｎｇｓ Ｓｏｃｉｅｔｙ」
Your service to the wired is underappreciated.
Tess
Ciao An,
As we already reported, after the privacy changes on SpaceHey, there is a problem with the reproduction of the spotify players; it loads just 30 sec. of track like we are not logged in spotify (even if we are)...
We just discovered that this problem is related to some browsers, for example, there is no problem with mozilla while instead, it appears in Vivaldi... When you can, please check this situation ;) ;)
bonkmaykr
I don't really agree with this update.
regular HTML5 media embeds like the audio tag allow for DRM-free control over the media where it won't be abruptly taken down by a record company or otherwise restricted at the profile owner's inconvenience. It also mostly avoids the tracking problem you mentioned. You can't get a whole lot from IP address alone these days, especially with rising use of proxy servers, hence why Javascript fingerprinting is used on so many sites.
Regardless I appreciate the work you've done to make this site what it is
Tess
Hello An,
The players from spotify are now just reproducing preview of the songs even if the user is already logged in spotify... maybe after the privacy changes on SpaceHey, the widget does not communicate well with the site... When you can, please check ;) ;) Thank you in advance.
EngiQu33ring
This feels like a major step backwards, imo. I appreciate that you're trying to look out for our privacy, but this change now means that we can't use music or videos here without enabling players with trackers. Personally, I don't see how that's an improvement for our privacy over the tracker-free HTML5 audio and video tags.
☽☆☾εvεlyn☪️AKF☽☆☾
As for the autoplay, I hear it some profiles, but its not working on mine. :(
Nuave
My Youtube autoplay still not working. Is there a current workaround?
Queen Bee
music was playing fine on my page now all of a sudden can't hear it anymore..how do we get music on our page and for it to play?
stargirl
All of the gifs on my profile are gone :-( I had spent a lot of time picking out nice gifs and blinkies for each section of my profile and used Tumblr as a host for the images. They were the only cool thing I liked about my profile and I don't know how to make them come back.
Oh no, I'm so sorry! That's not suppoes to happen! Could you please sned me some links to the gifs that aren't working anymore? Thank you!!
by An
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builtfxrblame
not to sound whiny, but I changed my music-embed code to the one you linked to, and it still isn't working :/
it works perfectly fine in editors like W3, btw
(this is pretty much the code I was using previously)
(code in particular:
iframe width="0" height="0" src= https://www.youtube.com/embed/YMMGpoYYIPs?autoplay=1&;loop=1" title="Youtube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope;picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen=""/iframe
[edited so it actually posts as plain text])
Mines not working either. I don't think that's working at the moment.
by Nuave; ; Report
C0Y0TEC0RE
i have a special gif version of my pfp on my profile but this update ended up breaking it and im not sure what the workaround would be since its a pretty big gif :[
Hm, perhaps An had to put restrictions on it because of the host limitations? Perhaps in the future, right? :)
by Riyo Bischoff; ; Report
Seems to be working now.
by Frankkie; ; Report
Oh cool.
by Riyo Bischoff; ; Report
Frankkie
Hi An, you should make a bulletin post about this too, or a bulletin that has a link to this blog because not everyone is going to see this otherwise. With a bulletin, it gets put on our home page at least.
KNARD
While I understand the need for privacy, tracking, etc this really breaks a lot of layout functionality people took time to put into their page because many of the sources now have to be independently allowed per site source.
This makes the experience of browsing pages less enjoyable, I don't think many people want to go around clicking buttons just to see a what someone's page looks like.
This was a bad choice IMO - kinda splitting hairs between providing a nostalgic experience of old internet but wanting to abide to modern policies.
As an artist who is trying to use Spacehey as a new platform to share my music, this really kills my ability to brand my page cleanly, and instead I now have to provide a "background fix" section just so users can see the visual aesthetic I diligently made for my layout.
Instead of seeing my brand, they are seeing a bunch of requests for third party sites, it's terrible, and draws people away from even exploring my music.
by KNARD; ; Report
What do you mean? You have the option to be public or private. As long as you have your setting set to public everyone can see you...this doesn't affect you in anyway. So don't worry. lol
by Riyo Bischoff; ; Report
singsian
This is a great update for the privacy of visitors, however many of the 3rd party gifs that I have added in to my profile (which is pretty essential for the look I eventually designed for myself) are now unable to be rendered, and many other people have the same problems. I mean no harm in my criticism and I just wanted to let you know of this bug (or at least i hope it is a bug).
Thank you.
Hey there! I fixed a few things and it seems like all gifs on your profile are now loading properly! Could you check if it works for you too? Thanks!
by An
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it works now. thank you!
by singsian; ; Report