Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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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How can you bypass a Reddit site ban? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

9 comments fedilink hide all child comments

After getting randomly banned on a subreddit (without breaking any of the rules) and accidentally posting on there with a different account, Reddit permanently banned me from their site. Appealing the ban didn't work.

Now, as soon as I create a new Reddit account it gets automatically suspended either immediately or after a few minutes to sometimes hours.

I assume many on Lemmy face similar situations and also switched to Lemmy because of a similar reason and they might also wonder how to bypass such a ban.

It seems like Reddit is using advanced fingerprinting since normal methods such as switching VPN, deleting and re-installing the browser/Reddit mobile app (including all associated data) and changing email doesn't work.

I'm not skilled enough and don't really have any "hacker knowledge" to bypass the ban. After extensive research I couldn't find a better solution than getting a new device or formatting the whole device.

I assume there must be a better way of changing ones fingerprint without just fully formatting the devices. Maybe it could work by changing the MAC address or something?

My goal is to not have a complicated way of accessing Reddit and resolving the issue in a way that one can access it completely normally again like in my case with the Chrome/Edge browser on Windows, Safari on Mac, and the Reddit app on Android.

Maybe someone has the knowledge here to help with this.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Unless its embedded in the data in higher layer protocols intentionally ( and it might be, I dunno what's available to query from the server side anymore ) the mac won't be passed beyond the local segments, as in routed traffic.

In other words, mac only matter in local network communication. Between your devices and router both know each other's MAC but when your router passes that traffic to your ISP on prem equipment, and doesn't make it to the end.

Going back to what's available for the server to query, I know there are a lot of params you can see but I'd be shocked if MAC were, I don't recall seeing it used as a fingerprint. I'm gonna try to dig in and see when I have some time.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Actually you might be right. I was just a bit lazy to research it.

I've just seen enough Wikipedia sockpuppet investigations, where the server admin can see what device you're using. I'm assuming that they can often view your OS and device name, which indeed are easily changable.