598
This post knows where you're viewing it from (Lemmy doesn't proxy external images) [ARCHIVED]
(lemmy.ml)
Note: This post now archived and as such no longer works
this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
598 points (96.6% liked)
Privacy
32026 readers
721 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
By not using internet. No, seriously, if you access something over the internet, you will leave tracks. This here post is nothing new or inherently scary on its own. I used to have forum signatures that would tell people what browser they were using or from what IP they were coming.
What you really want to do is disable third party cookies on everything you own. That (and things like hsts super cookies) is what tracks you.
If you’re using an app to browse Lemmy, you might ask for their implementation to reject cookies and fingerprinting attempts when displaying images and other embeddables.
a minute later edit: And yeah, if you don’t like web services to know the IP address given to you by your ISP, VPN is a decent option.
It's quite the difference between leaving tracks on only one provider's servers (where your account is hosted), and leaving tracks all over the internet.
There were a few comments under this post about how (easily!) this could be used to find out the IP address and though it the rough location of a commenter.
Lemmy proxying image loads won’t fix this issue at all. Unless you only ever access resources through it, which you won’t. It will even make the problem worse by exposing a single attack surface.
Don’t trust the collection of random internet services to protect interests they are not set out to protect. You wanna hide your IP? Use VPN or Tor.
I mean, Stallman has a point here.