I've been seeing a few different vendors do this already. MongoDB's ObjectIds are inherently timestamps (so you can actually generate generic MongoDB IDs to query based on time). There's also Discord's Snowflakes as well. I'm sure there's loads of others. All it tells you is when something was generated, not much else. I do love how MongoDB has it stored in such a way that it is easy to query against. I wonder if any RDBMS' will allow you to query these timestamps as well.
Can’t agree with that logic. Unless it’s specifically documented leaking timestamp data is going to get totally forgotten. So when you add (e.g.) the ability to change the sent timestamp on a message you’re going to inadvertently leak when a timestamp has been changed. Could cause embarrassment in a lot of scenarios.
This reminds me of that recent investigation regarding fudged data in those Harvard studies. The fields stored the "original" ID, solidifying their creation sequence, which differed to the displayed sequence - Implying that the fields were updated out-of-sequence, thereby they were tampered with.
Sure but what are cases where knowing when a random GUID was created is actually an issue of privacy? Every platform I've seen using Snowflakes that exact same data is publicly available.
It’s a case by case thing. I don’t disagree that in the vast majority of cases it won’t matter at all. But once it becomes the norm/default it’s inevitable that it’ll lead to inadvertent leaks.
