A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
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.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn’t great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don’t promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
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much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
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Jokes on you! I use a Firefox extension that spoofs my browser profile. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/chameleon-ext/
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Man, I remember I scared the crap out of trolls on Reddit when we started arguing over DM, and I added a link to a meme that tracked their IP and system info (without them knowing ofc). Let’s just say they went AFK quickly after that. Good times!
Image proxies are a must have, let’s hope we get those soon!
Easiest way to stop this from happening is to use ublock origin to block all third party request on your instance.
One way to do this is via dynamic filtering. This is for advanced users so be sure to read the info page: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering
(Consider backing up your ublock settings before doing this)
If you are using lemmy.ml your rule would be this:
if you’re using another instance then change the domain or use both rules cause you might end up visiting the others as well. Note that adding this rule wont work unless enable advanced features in ublock origin.
EDIT: THIS MIGHT BREAK THINGS ON YOUR INSTANCE, its recommended to learn how to use dynamic filtering to unbreak it: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Dynamic-filtering:-quick-guide If it breaks stuff just remove that rule.
You could also block it using static filters but I can’t remember how to do that exactly, if you know please reply below.
Oh neat, Jerboa doesn’t identify itself. Cool.
Same on Sync (You are viewing this from an unknown (mobile?) client)
And on infinity (You are viewing this from Android)
I get “unknown (mobile?) client” using Jerboa
I’m fine with this. Instances shouldn’t proxy or cache images because it opens instance owners to a lot more liability than text. A client side setting to not load images in comments by default is better.
Each instance stores post thumbnails locally even if the post was on another server. It actually takes up quite a bit of hdd space.
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
All these people correcting the result effectively giving useful data to improve data collection and detection methods.
VPN using Librewolf user checking in. This post got nothing on me.
The image doesn’t load on alexandrite
unknown device?
The user-agent detection definitely isn’t great. If it doesn’t recognize a client, it just says unknown. But that wasn’t the main point of the post anyway, this was just meant as a quick proof of concept for anyone curious.
Whats the point of unknown?
It kinda knows.
unkown
Oh, how did I not notice that before? Now should be fixed.
Still says unkown for me.
The unkown sounds pretty fucking scary to me
It tells me I’m an unknown client. Viewing from Jerboa on a Gigaset GX290 phone without an NLP provider or Google Play Services.
It says unknown (mobile?) client for me too, using Sync with Bluetooth and location enabled and Play Store Services installed.
Whoever wrote that image tracking over-hyped it?
The user-agent detection definitely isn’t great, this was just meant as a quick proof of concept for anyone curios.
It successfully identified Firefox when I checked it from the browser. Maybe some of the apps don’t identify themselves in the useragent string?
I’m also on jerboa, but a Samsung with GPS, and it also tells me unknown device. Must be jerboa
I would’ve hoped that lemmy users on a c called privacy would understand the technology better, but I guess not.
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I hate this so much. Its super cool but MAN what the hell. I don’t think I’m going to ever turn off my VPN anymore. I’m in a super small town and that image is correct.
It’s cached somewhere because I can’t get it to update. Maybe time for a new account too. Hmmmm
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Yeah, app cache had to be cleared. We good
My location is accurate, to give some good feedback on your program too lol
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I’m not using a VPN or anything and it got my location wrong by 700 kilometers 🤔
Are you sure you are where you think you are? When’s the last time you looked outside?
Oh no! I’ve been kidnapped!
I’m not using a VPN and the location isn’t accurate.
You can run Geolocation with images now? What the heck? How?
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It’s not the image, it’s a normal image. The server does the hard work when you make the request, and then it just builds the image accordingly.
Yeah I saw OPs explanation in the comments. That is fucking cool! And scary! I’ve never needed to generate images with code before, so Ive never even considered something like this before.
Thought about adding the user’s location, but was worried PythonAnywhere could somehow cache the image between multiple people. A great demo though!
This is great, because it located me about a full day’s drive from where I live, so I’m still pretty anonymous :-)
Hah, not my town, but close. That’s where my ISP is located though.
It’s got me about an hour from where I actually am
I was wondering for a second why my town of all places was posted lmao. Also made me realize I forgot to turn my vpn back on.
You have the code for this? Very interested in how you implemented it
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Damn, PHP is such a sleeper of a language, I always forget how useful it can be.Thanks for sharing!
PHP is the OG bad-ass for getting shit done. No setup, no compile, no deployment pipelines. Hell, you can create and write the files right there on the server with nothing more than an SSH terminal if you want.
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Nice, sounds like it’s getting modernized. I’ll have to give it another round, thanks!
Genuinely curious, how is it superior to Python in your opinion?
Edit: Apart from the things you listed 😅
It can run natively on an Apache server without any frameworks required to render user website markup and serve pages. That’s a pretty awesome advantage.
PHP is pretty damn awesome really… Sad that it’s gone out of favor IMHO
Location is right, but I highly doubt anyone near me is using Lemmy (dictatorship here).
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Great, hot milfs near my location
Woah this is really cool. Though I was way off for me and I’m not on a VPN right now.
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Hey. I wanted to do this tomorrow.
Well I have a new idea which is pretty similar
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I’m plannig to make one of these “dox’d memes” where someone says something controversial and another one answers with the ip address.
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Joke’s on you. IP geolocation where I am is an unreliable mess and your image got it wrong by about 1000km!
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Finally. Someone noticed 🥹
I wonder why the Baltimore community is so dead, then.
Thanks for the heads-up.
Routing my Lemmy mobile app through orbot from now on. Seems to have fixed the issue.
I’ll be damned. I tried this from three different platforms and you’ve nailed it.
I’m using Firefox on Mac and it thought I was on windows. Still a big issue though.
It said I’m on Mac OS X, but that’s wrong. It’s been macOS for some years now. /s
It still makes me wanna cry.
Yeah, I just use whatever the
user_agentsPython library gives me asuser_agent.os.family.deleted by creator