Associating IPs with social media accounts is a step towards identifying people so they can threaten them and force them into settlements.
It’s a numbers game for the lawyers. They want as much data as they can get to identify the largest number of people so they can demand an out-of-court settlement.
The “DMing pictures” part is just an example of how they could gather that kind of data from a social network like Lemmy that can’t be so easily subpoenaed, and allows image hotlinking. I don’t have any evidence that they are doing this (yet), I just know that it would work.
They would just have to start DMing us meme images hosted on a server they control, and they’d get a list of IPs. All we’d have to do is look.
Fwiw, this would work on Reddit too.
Unless anyone shared the in image link anywhere else on the internet. “Judge, they looked at this publicly accessible image” is hardly evidence
Sometimes you don’t have to win a court case legally, to win a court case. Just the harassment of the lawsuit is enough.
That’s not a lawsuit they would even attempt, as it would get immediately thrown out.
People use the threat of lawsuit as an intimidation tactic all the time.
So they would send random DMs with pictures, to threaten lawsuits they couldn’t enforce, to achieve what exactly?
They wouldn’t have to send random DM’s if they got the IP addresses more directly, as the article describes.
The comment I originally replied to:
I’m aware. My point still stands.
They know what torrents people download by IP.
anyone can figure that out: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/
Associating IPs with social media accounts is a step towards identifying people so they can threaten them and force them into settlements.
It’s a numbers game for the lawyers. They want as much data as they can get to identify the largest number of people so they can demand an out-of-court settlement.
The “DMing pictures” part is just an example of how they could gather that kind of data from a social network like Lemmy that can’t be so easily subpoenaed, and allows image hotlinking. I don’t have any evidence that they are doing this (yet), I just know that it would work.
Yeah, but do you publicly share every spam DM image that is shared with you? Would you even know if this happened, so you could react?