For now, it’s this way, that a user is probably sending a bunch of personal information (User Agent, resolution and so on) to every host of a hotlinked image.
In order to protect the users, I’ve thought, it might be clever to route the request through the pods server instead. This way, the third-party-server would only “see” the pod (IxQuick/StartPage shall work the same way).
Look, the point is, that advertisement industry is moving a way from a cookie-based approach to a browser-information-based. The headers provide enough details to almost identify an user.
I totally agree with this idea!
I talked about it with some people a while ago (@Flaburgan for example) and the answer I got was it would be too strenuous for the pods.
@erwanguyader Well, Jason suggested to make it optional for a podmin.
At least, one could cache the images (?) for example with Varnish. Downside is, that this needs another port than :80, so Heroku-user would be excluded. But it’s imaginable, that a podmin runs it on a “better” server with the permissions for running services on multiple ports.
I’m not against, but it should be an option. My old server had a very slow bandwidth (ADSL connection) so it was unthinkable to proxy pictures. But as an option and with a clever cache, why not…
This is good and bad maybe, right now all the “porn” content is on jd.com, my host is not ok with porn, but its not on my server. I wonder if I am the proxy of porn or other content from pods that is illegal or not allowed by my ISP/Host then they will view it as me hosting it if a proxy was used? On a good side it would releave the broken SSL icon issue we have had for so long without links to http images.
A simpler solution for privacy-aware users would be to disable rendering of image links in posts. That’s something we did on Libertree because I’m not comfortable with taking over responsibility for whatever image some user on the network links to by hosting a copy on my own server.
Those who disable images will simply be shown links to the image URL.
@rekado Well, if I understand you correctly, this would need the users to actually use the alt-attribute. But things like “img” aren’t that descriptive …