Note: This post now archived and as such no longer works
This is possible because Lemmy doesn’t proxy external images but instead loads them directly. While not all that bad, this could be used for Spy pixels by nefarious posters and commenters.
Note, that the only thing that I willingly log is the “hit count” visible in the image, and I have no intention to misuse the data.
Interesting demo! Does this use the user agent string for identifying clients?
on hexbear, all i get is
*removed externally hosted image*
Can countermeasures be implemented in the clients to mitigate privacy risks, while not having to proxy images?
no. the remote server will log the requests based on the client address. it is a good argument for using a vpn.
Oh I mean, sure, but I don’t think IP logging is the main privacy concern with spy pixels.
I’m assuming this trick uses the user agent string and other request metadata to identify clients. Even if it didn’t recognize Jerboa as a client, it did guess that I was on mobile. That’s not possible just by tracking IPs, unless they’re cross-referencing it with other datasets. Also, I was on VPN anyway, so the IP would have been useless.
It should be possible for clients to obfuscate/fake the metadata of image requests to make tracking with spy pixels less effective.
Yup, I’m parsing the user agent with the user_agents Python library.
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
If you wanted to target a specific user, you could always send a DM with the image
Unknown mobile client. Yeah, I’m pretty mysterious like that.
