As I like the convenience of directly viewing inline/embedded web content from within the Obsidian app, but also value privacy, is there a means to harden Obsidian security to curtail Big Tech telemetry and tracking when viewing external web content within Obsidian? For example, deleting cookies, clearing cached web content, etc. Anything that might track what web content I’m viewing within Obsidian.
Things I have tried
Using Obsidian for viewing YouTube inline videos as an example, to minimize exposure to Google telemetry, I have fire walled all Google related websites to the Obsidian app except for those Google websites required for the video content to play. As such, I’m able to view the YouTube content inside of Obsidian as if in a web browser.
I would like to know if Obsidian has a best practice means to clear downloaded web content and cookies. I want to minimize Big Tech profiling of my browsing activity within Obsidian. Does Obsidian have any means to prevent Big Tech from tracking the web content we view from within inside the app?
I know that I can simply open the content within an external browser, but I like the “cool” factor of viewing the content inline on the Obsidian canvas.
From the lack of immediate response from the community, I assume Obsidian’s posture regarding Big Tech tracking hasn’t been explored or isn’t a hot topic.
As such, I’ll pull out the usual forensic tools to start digging. I’ll report back here for those interested.
My attention tends to bounce around a lot, but I promise to set aside a couple of hours to explore what’s going on behind the covers.
And I’m by no means throwing shade at Obsidian’s privacy posture, I’m just a card carrying member of the tinfoil hat brigade and enjoy keeping Big Tech surveillance at a distance.
This is really for those of us of the tin foil hat persuasion
There’s a Cookies file saved in %appdata%/obsidian/ (Windows) and ~/Library/Application Support/obsidian/ (macOS) that looks to have a few YouTube entries (and some other stuff) on my devices.
So, I had only been embedding inline web content (for example, YouTube videos) into Obisidan up until the point I approached the forum with the question above.
Today, I finally got around to following up on this post and immediately found that Obsidian provides a core plugin called Web Viewer which allows web content to open within Obsidian directly rather than an external browser.
Whilst Obsidian may not have the advanced security features of a dedicated web browser, I’m very satisfied to find natively supported ad blocking lists as well cache management. These two features are more than adequate for my purposes.
My primary concern was cookies hanging around indefinitely for nosey websites to gobble up and profile me.
Combined with @ariehen 's response above, I’m happy to close this thread.
BTW: Hats off to the Obsidian team for creating such a versatile, powerful app. It checks all my autistic boxes.
Although having been unemployed for a good long while, I’ve signed up for the yearly single-vault sync plan. I consider the money well spent on a project that is more than deserving.
Opening Obisidian is the first thing I do in the morning, and the last thing I do at night.
So happy to have found you all.
