Privacy Guides
In the digital age, protecting your personal information might seem like an impossible task. We’re here to help.
This is a community for sharing news about privacy, posting information about cool privacy tools and services, and getting advice about your privacy journey.
You can subscribe to this community from any Kbin or Lemmy instance:
Check out our website at privacyguides.org before asking your questions here. We've tried answering the common questions and recommendations there!
Want to get involved? The website is open-source on GitHub, and your help would be appreciated!
This community is the "official" Privacy Guides community on Lemmy, which can be verified here. Other "Privacy Guides" communities on other Lemmy servers are not moderated by this team or associated with the website.
Moderation Rules:
- We prefer posting about open-source software whenever possible.
- This is not the place for self-promotion if you are not listed on privacyguides.org. If you want to be listed, make a suggestion on our forum first.
- No soliciting engagement: Don't ask for upvotes, follows, etc.
- Surveys, Fundraising, and Petitions must be pre-approved by the mod team.
- Be civil, no violence, hate speech. Assume people here are posting in good faith.
- Don't repost topics which have already been covered here.
- News posts must be related to privacy and security, and your post title must match the article headline exactly. Do not editorialize titles, you can post your opinions in the post body or a comment.
- Memes/images/video posts that could be summarized as text explanations should not be posted. Infographics and conference talks from reputable sources are acceptable.
- No help vampires: This is not a tech support subreddit, don't abuse our community's willingness to help. Questions related to privacy, security or privacy/security related software and their configurations are acceptable.
- No misinformation: Extraordinary claims must be matched with evidence.
- Do not post about VPNs or cryptocurrencies which are not listed on privacyguides.org. See Rule 2 for info on adding new recommendations to the website.
- General guides or software lists are not permitted. Original sources and research about specific topics are allowed as long as they are high quality and factual. We are not providing a platform for poorly-vetted, out-of-date or conflicting recommendations.
Additional Resources:
- EFF: Surveillance Self-Defense
- Consumer Reports Security Planner
- Jonah Aragon (YouTube)
- r/Privacy
- Big Ass Data Broker Opt-Out List
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Can someone with more knowledge on the lemmy protocol/api bring some light into this? The way the linked posted is written, it seems like some random angry guy just hates lemmy for whatever reason.
To me it seems like a complete bs argument. As far as I can tell this tactic is possible with every service where users can provide content. Of course I can link to a site that reads users data. There’s basically no preventing this unless the (lemmy) clients provide their own modified browser that masks the users IP and other metadata.
You actually can prevent this easily with CSP (content security policy). That header tells your browser which adresses it is allowed to load additional data from when visiting your site. It is an important tool to prevent cross-site scripting attacks, your browser should not load data from random sources when it is on your site.
Of course you would have to funnel all inline images through a site-local proxy that the browser is allowed to load data from.
This also has not only security implications, but also with the GDPR. Some jurisdiction consider ip addresses as personal data. Sending them to e.g. the US without user consent would be a violation. I know it is stupid to consider ip addresses as personal data and it is stupid to consider a browser loading data as sending that personal data somewhere on the sites' behalf. But there is a reason why a lot of websites for example only embed tweets after you explicitely allow it.
When it comes to posting on lemmy I'd also consider bringing up that old bromide: don't post anything you wouldn't want your mother to see.
At least for now, anyway.
There is definitely some of that at play here. I am hoping some smarter cybersec folks without the anti-lemmy-rage-bias can weigh in on t.
I think when you link images off-site on Reddit, Reddit still caches a preview for it and serves that to the user, the user will actually have to click a link to go off the platform into the unknown. If we do embeds and such here they’re loaded from off site directly without user interaction.
Ergo your browser makes a request to a random potentially dangerous server, and there isn’t much the average user can do to prevent that.
This is a valid privacy issue, and other fediverse projects like Mastodon already solve this. The problem is that by embedding an image, you can tell the client to make a network request to your server, revealing information such as your IP address and browser. The solution is to proxy media through your instance, which is presumably trusted. this hides your IP address and browser information. And as someone else mentioned here, a Content-Security-Policy can be used to ensure this attack isn't possible in a browser.