element-hq / element-hq/element-meta

User Avatar History

Open
#325 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
A-Avatar A-Right-Panel A-User-Info O-Uncommon Privacy T-Enhancement X-Needs-Design X-Needs-Product
Dominant language
No language data
Stars
112
Forks
25
Avg merge
6h 6m
Merged PRs (30d)
4

Description

### Your use case

#### What would you like to do?

Be able to view previous user avatars easily.

#### Why would you like to do it?

Telegram has this feature, and it's useful when trying to recognise users with high-churn profile changes, such as avatars.

### Have you considered any alternatives?

_No response_

### Additional context

There is a high privacy hazard associated with this, even though the data is there (in DM rooms or public rooms) to support this, this feature would make it easier to access that data through one way or another, lowering the threshold.

Additionally, while this feature specifically focuses on Avatars, other details of a user are also encoded in the history of a room, and those details are less relevant for retrieval (display names, or in the future, bio). These elements have an even higher privacy risk.

Finally, for this feature, I think a user should be able to remove avatars from their "history". However, this is tricky, as room history is immutable, and the only way to hide data from state history is redaction, which is discouraged.

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

Research direction

No implementation files, tests, or entry points are named. Start by clarifying the client scope, privacy constraints, and handling of avatar removal or redaction; the issue is ready for implementation only once those decisions produce concrete acceptance criteria.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
security
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Needs clarification
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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