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Replicate updated security & privacy considerations to IETF draft.
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This was updated in the upstream WICG document: WICG/nav-speculation@29cfa18
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jeremyroman authored Jun 4, 2024
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ann: WHATWG

informative:
HTML:
target: https://html.spec.whatwg.org/
title: HTML Living Standard
author:
-
ins: A. van Kesteren
name: Anne van Kesteren
org: Apple Inc.
ann: WHATWG
NAV-TRACKING-MITIGATIONS:
target: https://privacycg.github.io/nav-tracking-mitigations/
title: Navigational-Tracking Mitigations
author:
-
ins: P. Snyder
name: Pete Snyder
org: Brave Software, Inc.
-
ins: J. Yasskin
name: Jeffrey Yasskin
org: Google LLC
ann: W3C Privacy CG

--- abstract

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# Security Considerations

TODO Security
The main risk to be aware of is the impact of mismatched URLs. In particular, this could cause the user to see a response that was originally fetched from a URL different from the one displayed when they hovered a link, or the URL displayed in the URL bar.

However, since the impact is limited to query parameters, this does not cross the relevant security boundary, which is the [origin](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/browsers.html#concept-origin) {{HTML}}. (Or perhaps just the [host](https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#concept-url-host), from [the perspective of web browser security UI](https://url.spec.whatwg.org/#url-rendering-simplification). {{WHATWG-URL}}) Indeed, we have already given origins complete control over how they present the (URL, reponse body) pair, including on the client side via technology such as [history.replaceState()](https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/nav-history-apis.html#dom-history-replacestate) or service workers.

# Privacy Considerations

TODO Privacy
This proposal is adjacent to the highly-privacy-relevant space of [navigational tracking](https://privacycg.github.io/nav-tracking-mitigations/#terminology), which often uses query parameters to pass along user identifiers. However, we believe this proposal itself does not have privacy impacts. It does not interfere with [existing navigational tracking mitigations](https://privacycg.github.io/nav-tracking-mitigations/#deployed-mitigations), or any known future ones being contemplated. Indeed, if a page were to encode user identifiers in its URL, the only ability this proposal gives is to *reduce* such user tracking by preventing server processing of such user IDs (since the server is bypassed in favor of the cache). {{NAV-TRACKING-MITIGATIONS}}

# IANA Considerations

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