Three years ago, a made-up rule was used to ban me from Canvas for helping draw a QR code linking to the Dominion documentary. I was subsequently unbanned and the years that followed went smoothly.

Canvas Atlas was previously a third-party website run by Marius David, who did not try to interfere with community members' submitted titles and descriptions, be it a Watch Dominion link or a QR code.

The hands-off approach changed with the creator of Canvas, Grant, becoming the Atlas maintainer for this year, though Grant was quite selective about it: of the 50 submissions reviewed and accepted, Grant decided to modify just five.

Three of them had superficial changes:

• A Discord link correction for Vylet Pony.
• A Wikipedia link added for Antifa.
• A typo fixed for e621.

The more substantive changes were aimed strictly at the works related to animal welfare. A QR code leading to https://3minutes.wtf/canvs was marked ambiguously by Grant as a "tracking link" as if to scare people off following it, whereas the description for Dominion was amended with that from Wikipedia and the link to the documentary was pushed down by a Wikipedia link added by Grant. Though the problem with the latter is hopefully obvious, and even more so when you consider that other artworks leading to websites did not get Wikipedia links from Grant (e.g. Serious Sam, Subnautica 2, KDE, Factorio and Inugami Korone), I'll break down the former.

The default 3minutes.wtf link leads to a popup asking for a code, so following the bare link is not the smoothest experience. A customized link like /canvs allows to bypass that popup and lead people straight to the three minutes movie challenge as intended. That customized link also allows to see the views counts per page, video, and post-watch replies if volunteered by the visitor. Zero personally identifiable information.

The aggregated views counts available for custom 3minutes links are in contrast to the widely used Google Analytics and Cloudflare that collect (and sometimes sell) IP addresses, web browser data, technical details, demographics data and much more. The services are present all over the web, including the websites found on the Canvas or its Atlas: pawb.social, Reddit and YouTube, to name a few.

Grant's own Canvas can easily tie IP addresses to usernames and potentially collect a lot of browser data through JavaScript, which can include the user's desktop resolution, graphics card, browser and system language, timezone, installed extensions, and a lot more.

Low-traffic personal websites found on the Canvas, such as Redjard.org, can also be used to determine page views attributable to Canvas and guess Canvas users' locations. For the former, the site owner would just have to compare their average views to those from when their website appeared on the Canvas. For the latter, they can isolate the connections made within the same time frame, check the IP addresses for geographic locations, then do a Lemmy API lookup through the Canvas participants' comments to see if anyone has mentioned a similar location. If it's a small town, chances are it may be the same user.

But for some reason, it's only an animal welfare link that deserves a "tracking link" warning from Grant.