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A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

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Phone home tracking image in DocuSeal, and how to remove it (www.reddit.com)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Kinda proud of this, so forgive me while I brag. I found a likely "phone home" tracking image in DocuSeal. I searched around: there was an extant issue about the image. I asked the devs: would they accept a PR to remove the image? A maintainer responded quickly that they were not interested in a PR to remove it, so I forked it in minutes with my tiny hack, built a new Docker image and re-deployed to my server after making a one-line change in a Docker Compose file.

Here's the hack: https://github.com/meonkeys/docuseal/commit/e710678d

Happy to share my compose config as well if folks are interested.

I do want to put in a plug for DocuSeal: they made an excellent thing. It's a fast and beautiful app for adding signatures to PDFs, similar to DocuSign or HelloSign, but awesomely AGPL licensed and easy to self-host. I got it running in minutes and it worked very well. I support what they're doing and I want to see them succeed. OpenSign looks cool too but I haven't tried that one yet.

So yeah. Self-hosting and FOSS FTW!

cross-posted to: reddit r/selfhosted (there's no additional content in the post at that link. Sorry, I should have posted on Lemmy first! Anyway, above is the copy/pasted post so you can get it without having to use reddit)

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

Just to play devils advocate for a minute- Loading from their own domain means they can actually garner quite a bit of information from just the serving of the svg:

date and time of access
IP (country, state, region, etc)
Potential for SVG xss attack if hoster doesn't clamp down their CSP settings

Date/time/IP are good enough for getting pretty good estimates of who all uses their software. Doesn't matter if they are or aren't using that data- it is being sent to them on their own accord and terms. The public has no way of knowing.

And this is all perfectly acceptable, as long as you do one of the following:

Prominent notice to user that tracking is enabled by default, and it can be disabled by doing X, Y, or Z. State the kind of tracking information collected and maybe even say logs are kept in memory or dumped after X days.
Allow for opt-in tracking. This one's pretty straightforward.

All of this doesn't really matter if the dev isn't willing to change anything about the remote image.

But a fork?? Yeah, totally unnecessary. You can take easily care of this at the reverse proxy layer by preventing the svg (or anything else for that matter) from being served. Just serve a 404 or something instead or do a regex replace and remove it altogether from the page prior to serving.