Note: This post now archived and as such no longer works

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

  • It would be interesting to see just how much info is shared when lemmy requests the image. If there is [potentially] sensitive info being shared, the devs might be interested in working on it too (I have no idea how to check such a thing, this comment is just so I can find the post later when more people have shared their wisdom on it)

    •  Muddybulldog   ( @muddybulldog@mylemmy.win ) 
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      11 months ago

      None (by Lemmy), as Lemmy doesn’t actually request the image (that would be proxying). Your browser requests the image directly by URL. Lemmy, technically, doesn’t even know an image exists. It just provides the HTML and lets your browser do the work.

      •  CoderKat   ( @CoderKat@lemm.ee ) 
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        311 months ago

        Yup. And to add, your browser will send things like:

        1. Your IP address. Technically this is sent by the OS doing networking and is unavoidable. At best, a VPN can hide this, because the VPN sits in the middle.

        2. Various basic request headers, which most notably contains user agent (identifies browser) and language headers, both which you can fake if you want to.

        3. Cookies for that domain (if you have any). Those can track you across multiple requests and thus build up a profile of you.