this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025
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Nicole [LOCKED]
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Someone suggested it was a way to collect data on users. The filenames for the pictures are all different, and the only reason for that is tracking, just like they do with web beacons on web pages or spam email.
You generate a list of users and each one gets a unique filename. When someone contacts the server asking for that file, you can connect that user's anonymous online Identity with real-world data - date and time they were online, what ISP and area you connected from, your browser, operating system, etc. Combine that online fingerprint with that from data brokers, and you can track back to the person's real-world identity.
Rather unlikely, at least for the majority of images sent. They are hosted on regular lemmy instances (the ones I got are on lemmings.world, lemmy.doesnotexist.club and lemmy.net.au), so unless the spammer has access to the server logs of those instances, they can't use them for tracking.
What's notable though is that the instance the photos are hosted on never match the sender's instance, at least for me. So they probably upload them on one instance and copy the link into their spam script.