hendrik

I occasionally ask people such things and from what I got it’s kind of mixed. Even beyond Germany. But I didn’t do a proper study, I might be wrong.

Uh, I don’t think recording internal IPs would be legal where I live. But yeah, my ISP sends me bills every month, they know exactly how much data I use and where I live. My router runs my own Linux (OpenWRT), though.

And sure, that’s exactly why I personally am worried about the advertisement and tracking platforms. Those definitely make a living by connecting every minor detail. And they have more available like Browser fingerprints, device identifiers if you forgot to disable the advertisement id on your phone…

Though, I seriously doubt it’s a legitimate study. Standards dictate you’d do it with people’s consent and inform them what’s up. You’d get scolded by your professor if you did it like this. And I believe we do studies without explicit consent, but that’s university level stuff and I suppose you’d have to file a request with the ethics committee and have someone look at the study layout. I’d say if it is a “study”, it’s probably illegitimate and done by someone without much academic background. Or they don’t abide by the same standards all students do for specific reasons.

Hmmh. I have uBlock and LocalCDN installed in my browser because I’m more worried about all the Google and Metas out there. Most of the news articles linked here are on websites with like 3 different trackers. And Google and Meta definitely have enough info about everyone to correlate minor details.

I must say I’m not super worried about my IP leaking into the Fediverse. I mean the pictures as a direct message is yet another thing. But generally speaking, we have some trade-off here between privacy and spreading information across a distributed network. It’s not a good thing, but I think the benefits outweigh the downsides.

Yeah, I can see how exploration for further things could be the case.

I just wonder, do people also install browser extensions to cache all the google fonts, jsdelivr urls etc? Or do they just give away the same data to every link on this link aggregator platform and it’s just when it becomes very obvious as with this weird thing?

Location would be possible. For me it’s a few 100km off, but usually the GeoIP databases are more accurate.

Piefed doesn’t do much image caching or proxying. It only keeps thumbnails around. Once you open a post with more than a thumbnail in it (a full picture), your IP is revealed to the image hoster.

Sure, back when I was young enough to do really stupid “pranks”, we tried to vandalize Wikipedia once or twice. You get banned and re-try one day later. That’s kind of how it works with IP bans. But it gets rid of 99% of people who aren’t super persistent. And that’s enough. And also why they do it even if it’s not “perfect”. Our school had one static IP for the entire computer room, so over there Wikipedia wouldn’t accept edits for a whole week or two, until the ban properly expired.

Yeah, I heard it’s different with some providers in north america. But then again, it’s not very straightforward to track which IPs belong to which provider, in which timespans they get renewed and then match that to other info.

I mean for most users worldwide, the IP changes every 24h or so, maybe every few days. So I doubt it’s of great value unless you have access to another big database of current logins to match this against. And if you already have that database, I don’t see the value of recording the IP again. Only added info is that the user uses Lemmy, if there isn’t any identifier in the image URL.

I wonder what the use case is for gathering IP addresses of random internet connections.