this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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ICMP doesn't reveal any personal details. As opposed to say when you visit with the web browser where you can be fingerprinted, and perhaps have that tied to the rest of your browsing history or real world identity.
ICMP reveals your IP address, which is easily correlated with other traffic…
If the other traffic is already correlated to your IP, then what additional info does an ICMP echo leak?
It tells when the user is online. This is useful for sending spam, because being on top of the inbox makes it more likely your message will be read.
To be fair, I doubt anyone’s implemented this specifically for ICMP. Instead I’d expect tracking that watches for any IP traffic whatsoever, and that happens to include ICMP.
But this user plans to leave ping running all the time to check that their own Internet connection is working.
Either way, at any given time there's tons of traffic leaving your network, it just means that software is active, not that a human is active. On top of that, Cloudflare probably isn't selling the fact that an ICMP ping was received at their DNS server directly to spammers quickly enough for them to act and put an email at the top of your inbox, assuming that spam isn't caught by a spam filter first.
Thank you, and thanks for the counterpoint @[email protected]