Hello,
Could someone explain why the Mlem app seems to be at the top of the list based on my iOS privacy report collected over a couple of months? It's a bit weird that no other apps or Mastodon clients reach such high numbers. The Ice Cubes app, for example, only collected 10 domains even though it's also an ActivityPub based network. Additionally, Mlem app's second most frequently contacted domain was a Google domain used to track app analytics, similar to Snapchat, Reddit, or Monzo. Can anyone provide some transparency on this? Thank you.
It looks like the biggest domain count driver by far is image fetching for link posts, since rendering a website preview involves fetching both the preview image from the linked website and the favicon from Google (favicons account for all those
t1.gstaticcalls). Disabling website previews and the associated image fetching code cut the domain list down to just Lemmy instances. Mastodon appears to proxy image requests through the instance, which prevents that high domain count. Lemmy has recently added that feature, but right now only instances running the very latest Lemmy code perform image proxying.We're looking into adding enhanced privacy features to 2.0; we'll include one to disable fetching favicons and image thumbnails, since favicons especially are a known tracking/fingerprinting vector.
Ah that makes a lot of sense. Appreciate such a quick turnaround!