this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Lemmy

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This post knows where you're viewing it from (Lemmy doesn't proxy external images) [ARCHIVED] (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Note: This post now archived and as such no longer works

An external image showing your user-agent and the total "hit count"

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Can countermeasures be implemented in the clients to mitigate privacy risks, while not having to proxy images?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At it's basic level it will capture your IP address, but it won't really tie the IP to a user name, and there's not a role lot you can do with it

Attacks I can think of:

  • target advertising at users in a particular lemmy community
  • get a collection of IP addresses of people with specific problems or beliefs (indicated by membership in a lemmy community) to target with malware

A VPN would protect you in this case, but you need to be a bit of a privacy nut to also protect yourself from things that identify for advertising right now

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you wanted to target a specific user, you could always send a DM with the image

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

You could also correlate time of your log entry to order of comments sorted by new, with errors from the few clients that don't load images

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