Note: This post now archived and as such no longer works
Image proxies are a must have, let's hope we get those soon!
I feel like there isn't a real way to fix this, since lemmy isn't a single service, like I can choose any image host I want. The only way I could think of would be to have your instance download the images but that's currently not even support on the mastodon alike platforms even. The only thing you can do on Mastodon that I'm aware of is cache the images on your own server which could get costly
Jokes on you! I use a Firefox extension that spoofs my browser profile. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chameleon-ext/
Holy shit. How do we avoid this? VPN?
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:
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.
All these people correcting the result effectively giving useful data to improve data collection and detection methods.
Lemmy clients should really include an option to group or only show the first instance of a link for cases like this; where the same link is posted to multiple places.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
