Give users the option to disable connections to third-party services

[john-light]

Currently when the user opens Frame, even if they have Frame configured to use their own full node to fetch their balances, connections are still made to third-parties e.g. to check the user's NFT inventory. This sends these third-parties a ping, which at a minimum lets them know that someone who is most likely the owner of this address is now online, enabling them to track online activity over time (even if no onchain transactions are made); the surveillance could go further to collect the IP addresses associated with the user, keep track of all the assets this IP address is interested in, link all of the user's addresses in Frame together, etc etc.

When the user first opens Frame after this feature is activated (and perhaps in the settings menu from that point forward) the user should be asked if they would like to disable connections to third-parties and be informed that this may disable some features as well.

Bonus points: give the user the ability to self-host or run locally open-source alternatives to the third-party services you are making calls out to, so that the user can still get these nice features but without compromising their privacy.

[waokdalf]

Is frame open source?

[john-light]

@waokdalf yes. you are commenting in the repository that contains its source code. See: https://github.com/floating/frame

[waokdalf]

@waokdalf yes. you are commenting in the repository that contains its source code. See: https://github.com/floating/frame

I am asking because I saw several projects with code on github, but it was not fully open source. If you are, then it is very good. I hope your wallet will be more popular.
Now what we have now. Only 3 open source wallets: MEW, Frame, Gnosissafe and many many other shitwallets who wants to control other people.

[goosewobbler]

@john-light @waokdalf Check out our new Canary release - We have removed the Infura and Alchemy presets, replaced with a new preset "Pylon" which uses our internal Pylon EVM proxy, a service which provides RPC access via proxy but removes identifying information such as IP address. The other option for privacy conscious users, to connect to their own nodes, is still available. We're committed to improving the options available in Frame to improve privacy for our users.

[john-light]

@goosewobbler if the user has configured Frame to use their own full node, are any third party services pinged to e.g. load NFTs, token icons, etc? or is Frame no longer making calls out to third party services with this configuration?

[floating]

Hey John! NFTs and token icons are also behind the proxy but we do have a few calls that still need to be moved behind Pylon (when we fetch verified ABIs for example). Our plan is to move all of these calls behind Pylon, making it the only connection in Frame, and then give users the option to turn off the Pylon connection (and related functionality) for full privacy/decentralized mode. We still have a good bit more work to get to this point and ensure we can gracefully turn off related functionality but we're making progress.