Better security and privacy through image proxying

http://blog.fastmail.fm/2014/09/16/better-security-and-privacy-through-image-proxying/

by things • 12 years ago

10 8 12 years ago

blog.fastmail.fm

cr3ative• 12 years ago

The image server remains in the dark about who has actually requested it. That’s a big plus for your privacy.

Unless, of course, the image has an email-unique key in the URL somewhere.

robn_fastmail3• 12 years ago

I have edited that sentence to say "where the request came from" rather than "who has actually requested it".

Overall though, its still an improvement. A key in the URL does verify that the email address is deliverable, which isn't nothing, but still can't be directly correlated with an IP address or other tracking data.

sarciszewski• 12 years ago

Also: Reading/writing a user-uploaded file instead of serving it directly can reduce the risk of a malicious file being executed by the server.

(No c99.php.gif for you!)

mike-cardwell3• 12 years ago

Presumably this addition was prompted by Google adding the same thing to GMail earlier this year.

robn_fastmail3• 12 years ago

Actually the reason is that we're planning to roll out an EV cert later this year, and we hated the idea that an arbitrary email can remove the green badge.

Once we decided we wanted to do this, then we looked around to see what other places were doing. That's when we noticed Gmail, but it was actually Github's Camo proxy that we thought of first (and ended up cloning).

mike-cardwell3• 12 years ago

Your comment here strongly suggests the padlock was the primary reason for this change.

The content of the blog post strongly suggests that increased privacy was the primary reason and that the padlock change was secondary.

I'm surprised you weren't aware of GMail rolling this feature out. It was big news at the time. Not least because a lot of advertising companies were worried it would affect their bottom line.

Better security and privacy through image proxying

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