Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I am working as a data analyst. We had some cases were we were called to fix issues from other agencies.

The clients had forms data being sent as get-requests and from there email addresses and even more personal data in the URL (street, date of birth, and even more) was being transmitted into the analytics tools and also into marketing tools.

Regarding GDPR this is a breach and needs to be communicated to officials as well as the people affected.

Even a bank was affected by this type of implementation when customers wanted to open an account or make a loan application.



HTTP 101: do not transfer anything you don't want 'cached' as a GET request. Not only that, but some browsers will pre-emptively send GET requests or retry them so you'd have the double headache to worry about duplicate requests on the server-side.

It shouldn't require much experience to know when to use POST or some other HTTP verb - banks certainly have no excuse.


Email 101: Clickable links in emails are always GET, so extra parameters are set in the query string.

Marketing 101: User actions should take as little clicks as possible, so the action should be performed as soon as the user clicks the (GET) link.


> Marketing 101: User actions should take as little clicks as possible, so the action should be performed as soon as the user clicks the (GET) link.

Nope, some email clients might prefetch urls in email for various reasons. You should absolutely NOT do this (unless you are decitefully trying to game you engagement metrics.) The only case where you might be able to get away with it is when the user has an active login session that you can verify prior to performing the action.


In the case of email, the sender already knows your email address and so should have no need to put it in the URL. The URL should only have some long random or pseudorandom identifier that has no meaning to anyone but them.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: