I agree fully with him. I don’t care what part of your job gets harder, or what software breaks if you can’t make it work without unnecessarily invading my privacy. You could tell me it’s going to shut down the internet for 6 months and I still wouldn’t care.

You’ll have to come up with a really strong defense for why this shouldn’t happen in order to convince most users.

> I don’t care what part of your job gets harder, or what software breaks if you can’t make it work without unnecessarily invading my privacy.

I would suggest placing your computer back into the box, and returning it to its place of purchase.

> You could tell me it’s going to shut down the internet for 6 months and I still wouldn’t care.

Can you provide an itemized list of the severe security impacts that require such drastic action, that for some reason hasn't been a concern despite existing for 35 years, or are you purposely being obtuse? On the plus side, Google might be hiring for a consumer advocate.

I like your "you've been *** my ass for 35 years, please feel free to keep doing it for all eternity" attitude.

It just means I run a persistent client on your device that is permanently connected to the mothership, instead of only when you have your browser open.

I’m so glad most people don’t truly consider software devs to be real engineers, because this is a perfect example of why that word deserves so much more respect than this field gives it.

I'm sure it will require some work, but this is the price of security. The idea that any website I visit can start pinging/exploiting some random unsecured testing web server I have running on localhost:8080 is a massive security risk.

Or probing your local network for vulnerable HTTP servers, like insecure routers or web cameras. localhost is just the tip of the iceberg.

Can you define "local network"? Probably not. Most large enterprises own publicly-routable IP space for internal use. Internal doesn't mean 192.168.0.0/24. foo.corp.example.com could resolve to 9.10.11.12 and still be local. What about IPv6? It's a nonsense argument fraught with corner cases.

> Can you define "local network"?

Sure - a destination is "local" if your machine has a route to that IP which isn't via a gateway.

If your network is large enough that it consists of multiple routed network segments, and you don't have any ACLs between those segments, then yeah, you won't be fully protected by this browser feature. But you aren't protected right now either, so nothing's getting worse, it's just not getting better for your specific use case.

> Sure - a destination is "local" if your machine has a route to that IP which isn't via a gateway.

Fantastic. Well, Google doesn't agree

The proposal defines it along RFC1918 address space boundaries. The spitballing back and forth in the GitHub issues about which imaginary TLDs they will or won't also consider "local" is absolutely horrifying.

Cool so it will protect 99.999% of home networks. Compared to 0% which are protected now. Sounds great!

Not to be snarky, but that's a good example of "perfect being the enemy of good". You are totally right that there are corner cases, sure. But that doesn't stop us from tackling the low hanging fruit first. Which is, as you say, localhost and LAN (if present).

It should not even be able to communicate with the local network at all, it’s a goddamn web page. It should be restricted to just communicate with the server that hosts it and that’s it.

They define it the explainer this was originally based on: (https://github.com/WICG/private-network-access/blob/main/exp...)

Quote: We extend the RFC 1918 concept of private IP addresses to build a model of network privacy.

Concretely, there are 3 kinds of private network requests:

    public -> private
    public -> local
    private -> local

You not knowing how to properly configure or secure a web server to allay your concerns should not become everyone else's problem.

Somehow this hasn't been a 'massive security risk' for the last 35 years but suddenly is in 2025?

Honestly a much bigger problem is sites like Yelp making nearly every link on their mobile site a phony redirect to the App Store. That shit is infuriating and a much bigger real world problem.

The whole browser is a massive security leak. What genius thought it was a good idea for the web page I visit in the morning to get the weather forecast to be able to run arbitrary code and to communicate with arbitrary network hosts?

I’m sorry but this proposal is absolutely monumentally important.

The fact that I have to rely on random extensions to accomplish this is unacceptable.

I do understand this sentiment, but isn't the tension here that security improvements by their very nature are designed to break things? Specifically the things we might consider "bad", but really that definition gets a bit squishy at the edges.

This attitude kept IE6 in production well after its natural life should have concluded.