this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Lemmy

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

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[–] andscape@feddit.it 3 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Can countermeasures be implemented in the clients to mitigate privacy risks, while not having to proxy images?

[–] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

At it's basic level it will capture your IP address, but it won't really tie the IP to a user name, and there's not a role lot you can do with it

Attacks I can think of:

  • target advertising at users in a particular lemmy community
  • get a collection of IP addresses of people with specific problems or beliefs (indicated by membership in a lemmy community) to target with malware

A VPN would protect you in this case, but you need to be a bit of a privacy nut to also protect yourself from things that identify for advertising right now

[–] TriLinder@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

If you wanted to target a specific user, you could always send a DM with the image

[–] psud@aussie.zone 1 points 1 year ago

You could also correlate time of your log entry to order of comments sorted by new, with errors from the few clients that don't load images

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