Of course the general consensus on reddit is “lemmy devs are clueless and dangerous”. I’m pretty sure a lot of it is one guy with multiple alt accounts, tho. He has a Joe McCarthy attitude about lemmy because of one of the primary devs.
You actually can prevent this easily with CSP (content security policy). That header tells your browser which adresses it is allowed to load additional data from when visiting your site. It is an important tool to prevent cross-site scripting attacks, your browser should not load data from random sources when it is on your site.
Of course you would have to funnel all inline images through a site-local proxy that the browser is allowed to load data from.
This also has not only security implications, but also with the GDPR. Some jurisdiction consider ip addresses as personal data. Sending them to e.g. the US without user consent would be a violation. I know it is stupid to consider ip addresses as personal data and it is stupid to consider a browser loading data as sending that personal data somewhere on the sites’ behalf. But there is a reason why a lot of websites for example only embed tweets after you explicitely allow it.
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You actually can prevent this easily with CSP (content security policy). That header tells your browser which adresses it is allowed to load additional data from when visiting your site. It is an important tool to prevent cross-site scripting attacks, your browser should not load data from random sources when it is on your site.
Of course you would have to funnel all inline images through a site-local proxy that the browser is allowed to load data from.
This also has not only security implications, but also with the GDPR. Some jurisdiction consider ip addresses as personal data. Sending them to e.g. the US without user consent would be a violation. I know it is stupid to consider ip addresses as personal data and it is stupid to consider a browser loading data as sending that personal data somewhere on the sites’ behalf. But there is a reason why a lot of websites for example only embed tweets after you explicitely allow it.
When it comes to posting on lemmy I’d also consider bringing up that old bromide: don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your mother to see.
At least for now, anyway.