Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Can a website access my local network/learn about the existence of other devices without installing malware? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Basically title. Recently I saw a new option in Chromium website permission settings called "allow access to local network" or something like that and I know some antiviruses on Windows that can list all devices connected to the same WiFi network. I'm usually using Firefox based browsers that obviously don't have the option to disable or enable that access. So can some really invasive websites mine data about my local network, connected devices etc? And if so, what can I do to prevent it except for just disconnecting everything else when visiting such websites?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Is it maybe the case that the setting is for allowing/disallowing you to go to sites on your local network?

For example your router controls at "192.168.1.1" (example address) or a raspberry pi with a selfhosted service like nextcloud etc.

You can probably test whether my claim is true by trying to visit your routers page with the setting enabled vs. disabled. (I am not using Chrome)

I don't think websites have access to your local network through the browsers javascript engine, but I may be wrong.