Today I installed the Raccoon for Lemmy app. The app itself does not contain trackers or extra permissions.
However, after I clicked on the icon of the installed application, my firewall immediately showed the presence of the appbrain.com tracker.
In other applications for Lemmy, the firewall also displayed many blocked trackers.
I may be wrong since I am not a programmer, but I think that the trackers are loaded along with links to external news sites.
Is it really impossible to come up with protective mechanisms that would prevent trackers from leaking into Lemmy?
The web UI would be the safest bet I think.
Apps may have their own mechanisms for loading links to news articles, videos and stuff to make it show in a user-friendly way, with the downside that the linked website can respond with a tracking image as the Opengraph banner etc.
Does the same happen with the webinterface?
Yes. I specifically downloaded the new jQuarks browser just now to make it easy to detect new trackers, and went to https://lemmy.today . Firewall shows tracker appbrain.com
There are no calls to appbrain.com from lemmy.today. Chances are your own system is compromised.
For the purity of the experiment, I reinstalled the browser again and the first site I visited was a Mastodon instanse https://social.tchncs.de/
There are no trackers.
The lemmy.today owner may have modified their copy of Lemmy to include appbrain for site statistics.
I had a quick look at the site and that doesn’t seem to be the case. The browser on my PC doesn’t open any connections to appbrain.
It’s strange.
Maybe try a different Non-Lemmy website and see if it does that every time? And then try Lemmy again…
i wrote above that I went to the Mastodon instance and there were no trackers there.
I went to the Lemmy.world website and the firewall also found this tracker.
Look in developer tools in your browser. You can record the network activity while loading the page, and see whether the access to that site is coming from this page load. (It could also be something else on your system.)
