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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 1 year ago) by TriLinder@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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

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[-] ricecake@beehaw.org 9 points 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 5 points 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.

this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023

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