this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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Holy shit. How do we avoid this? VPN?
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.
I would say a user agent spoofer would be more useful for this particular image. The Mozilla team recommends User-Agent Switcher and Manager for Firefox users.
Where can I learn more about using this Firefox extension? I've installed it, but it hasn't changed the results of (https://trilinder.pythonanywhere.com/image.jpg).
I see I am able to black list pythonanywhere.com.
Here's a six-minute YouTube video explaining how to use it
TL;DW: Click on the extension icon, use the drop-down lists to find a browser and OS, select a pre-configured user-agent string from the list, and click "apply (container)" or "apply (all windows)". Having your user-agent string change randomly with each request is possible but requires writing a bit of JSON in the options.
TY!! That link works on Invidious, Yay! I'll check it when I get a break.
That's weird. The extension should definitely work with the image, as that's what I used when building this quick demo. Does the content of a site like this update?
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.
I posted this further up, but I think it's worth pasting here too:
Next DNS Blocks it apparently.
Wow! But mine didn't. Which filter lists are you using?
Well... Basically all...
I’m using a VPN, and the picture knows everything about me regardless.