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In all seriousness, all apps and frontends should to implement countermeasures (if they haven't already) so that you can turn off image previews as needed
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wtf
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It basically takes your IP address, looks up an estimated town based on some free geoip database you can download, and renders that as text inside an image.
OK, less magic than expected.
There have been tools to generate little images like this that people have been sticking inline in forum posts for decades. Literal decades. The world has not yet caught fire because of that, either.
If you're old enough, you'll remember seeing oodles of people's forum signatures containing a smiley face holding up a sign containing something like this:
You used to be able to embed arbitrary html in comments, which was awesome and terrifying
That's crazy, it knows where I live.
im scared
I’ve heard of tracking pixels in emails but never seen it like this. That’s quite impressive! Is it difficult to do?
im just south of okotoks, kind of a small world out here.
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yeah i seen your other comment. still kinda funny to me tho. I use a vpn router, multi wan, so not really too worried.
Didn't new reddit start having that? Never saw it except when not logged in mind you.
It did, but it was a "premium feature" - paying users would have to "boost" a community to alow them to enable this feature.
Only when enough users boosted, the feature became available. And once that threshold was no longer reached, the feature would go away.
...fun. They really took us for granted, eh.
Also it never worked in my third party app and became some stupid placeholder scrapyard, as you couldn't see the image.
Actually that feature isn't even that much abused So here is an useless gif
