How Link Previews Work
When you type or paste a link into a message, Vavo Chat can show a small card with the page's title, a short description and an image. This page explains how that card is made. It also covers the one thing the Link previews toggle in Settings → Privacy changes: whether your link is sent to Vavo's servers.
Why Your Device Never Visits the Website
To build a preview, someone has to load the page. If your phone did it, the website would see your IP address, and with it your rough location and network, before you had even sent the message. It could also set cookies or tell who shared the link.
So your device never fetches the page itself. It asks Vavo's servers to fetch it instead:
- The website sees a request from Vavo's servers, not from you. Your IP address, cookies and browser details never reach it.
- Before fetching, our servers remove everything after the
?and#in the link. Those parts often carry tracking codes or personal details, and a preview doesn't need them. - Our servers read only the page's title, description and preview image. The image is shrunk to a small thumbnail (at most 300 pixels) before it is sent back to you.
- Links to private or internal network addresses are refused, so a preview can't be used to probe networks behind our servers.
What Is Sent, and When
Previews are made on the sender's side. About half a second after you stop typing a link into the message box, the app sends that link to Vavo's servers and shows you the card. This happens before you press send, and even if you then delete the link.
- Only the link is sent. The rest of your message never leaves your device unencrypted.
- If Remove link trackers is on, tracking codes are removed from the link before it is sent.
- The request is anonymous. Vavo's servers do not log or store who asked for a preview of which link.
What Your Recipient Receives
When you send the message, the finished preview (title, description and thumbnail) goes inside the end-to-end encrypted message. Your recipient's device shows it from there and never contacts the website or our servers to display it. Nobody but the recipient can see which link you shared.
If a preview card doesn't match the link in the message text, the recipient's app won't show it. That way a card can't pose as a different page from the one the link actually opens.
When You Turn Link Previews Off
- Links you type are never sent to Vavo's servers for a preview, and your messages go out without preview cards.
- Previews that other people attach to their messages still appear. They came inside their encrypted message and showing them needs no network request.
- The setting applies to this device only and is not synced to your account.
Related
Questions
If anything here is unclear, contact us at [email protected] or visit our Support page.