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

    • Slotos@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • ReversalHatchery@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        No, seriously, if you access something over the internet, you will leave tracks.

        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.

        • Slotos@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          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.

    • ricecake@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      It’s not nearly as nefarious as people seem to think. Effectively all applications that access web resources send along what they are and basic platform information.
      This is part of how the application asks for content in a way that it can handle
      It does a little to let you be tracked, but there are other techniques that are far more reliable for that purpose.

      • PoliticalAgitator@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I posted this further up, but I think it’s worth pasting here too:

        I suspect with a coordinated pool of posts or multiple comments on the same post, you could narrow that IP address down to an actual user account.

        When a new comment is posted by a user, store, against their username, all IP addresses that visited since the last comment in that thread (by anyone). When a second comment is posted by a user, remove any IP addresses that don’t appear in both lists.

        I suspect you would have a very short list after two comments, and a single address after 3. It would also be extremely easy to both lure someone into viewing an image and bait them into multiple replies. Geolocate that IP and you know know vaguely where that user lives.

        Time to make sure you’re always on a VPN I guess.