this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Privacy

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Every time when a YouTube video is embedded in Lemmy, a bot appears, suggesting to use Front-end Piped (or another) instead of YT, which is certainly recommended, due to YouTube's inherent privacy concerns.

However, then it is not understandable, why in the case of images Imgur links are happily allowed, which is infinitely worse in terms of privacy, which shares user and usage data with the worst existing advertising companies, which makes it in little less than spyware.

As a suggestion I present 2 alternatives, which in addition to, as EU products, strictly adhere to the GDPR standard and even more.

As the main FileCoffee service, this, apart from images, supports ALL types of files, whether multimedia, video, documents, presentations or texts. Supports 15 MB/file and with optional registration to also use it as a personal host (100% free with mail, password) up to 30 MB/file, encrypted. Inclusions script one click for ShareX on Windows or MagicCap on Linux or Mac

The second is vgy.me, also privacy oriented, but supports only images, encryption, 20 MB/image, EXIF Data are removed, API for web pages.

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[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

FileCoffee and vgy.me are not frontends, they are independent European cloudservices since several years, FileCoffee since 2018, nothing to do with imgur. But yes, I think that this also should be managed by the Lemmy admins. Anyway its also an advice to all users with this alternatives to avoid this imgurcrap

[–] infeeeee@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah, ok, I misunderstood, because you started with the piped bot, and that's totally different from this services. So you are not writing about imgur frontends, but for uploaders to upload their images elsewhere. Sorry for the misunderstanding, I just don't like that bot.


But for embedding images, your privacy scan is not relevant, it's just the home page of imgur you scanned. If you share the direct link to the image, no tracker downloaded, only the image. Just rightclick on the image and 'Copy image link'. If you paste this link to this privacy inspector it says no trackers, as it's not a webpage, just an image. They will know your ip and useragent, but that's all, no extra tracking:

Of course it's better to support more privacy respecting services, and thank you for the recommendations, but it's not as big issue as it sounds. It doesn't affect the viewers of the images just the uploaders.

[–] Zerush@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Vgy delete the EXIF data, Imgur dont and know in any moment where its images are. It's not only the homepage of Imgur, it's among others the tracking pixel from facebook and the keylogging of TowerData which came with the sharelink which they know and the image. See the complete list of the companies which receive data from Imgur. It's one of the worst list I've ever seen. Thanks, even better GDrive. Blacklight can only scan websites, not files, for these you need other tools to analyze it.