Privacy

What the signature knows about you

I could hire a lawyer to write ten pages of this, or borrow it from some big site. There is no point. The whole gag of this signature is that it shows you a little of what every website you visit already sees. Nothing here is hacked off your machine, and nothing is collected that the rest of the web is not collecting already. So in plain English, here is exactly what happens.

Your IP address comes from the connection itself. The site sits behind Cloudflare, so it reads the CF-Connecting-IP header Cloudflare sets to your real address, and falls back to the raw connection address otherwise.

Your provider is a reverse-DNS lookup on that IP, the name your ISP publishes for it. That lookup is cached on the server for about an hour so it does not have to run on every single view.

Your browser and operating system are read from the user-agent string your browser sends with every request, the same string it hands to every other site.

That information is drawn into the image and shown back to you, not displayed for anyone else. Every forum embed is generated fresh for whoever is looking at it, so each person sees their own. None of it is stored beyond that short reverse-DNS cache, and none of it is sold or handed to anyone. The Trump variant of the sign reads none of this. It is just a random quote.