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.