[HN Gopher] Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does
___________________________________________________________________
Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does
Author : ybceo
Score : 344 points
Date : 2025-12-20 06:21 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (servury.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (servury.com)
| al_borland wrote:
| Any business that isn't willing to be as anonymous as Mullvad, I
| assume has a compromised business model that I don't really like.
| Assuming there aren't obvious reasons for needing the data, like
| tax filing, or various regulatory requirements.
|
| I don't understand why any company would want the liability of
| holding on to any personal data if it wasn't vital to the
| operations of the business, considering all the data breaches
| we've seen over the past decade or so. It also means they can
| avoid all the lawyers writing complicated and confusing privacy
| policies, or cookie approval pop-ups.
| martin-t wrote:
| > I don't understand why any company would want the liability
| of holding on to any personal data if it wasn't vital to the
| operations of the business, considering all the data breaches
| we've seen over the past decade or so.
|
| They're OK with the liability exactly because of this very
| sentence. As you said, there's so many data breaches... so
| where are the company-ending fines and managers/execs going to
| prison?
| tjpnz wrote:
| Here in Japan the government cracks down on it hard. There
| are fines for every n users exposed and in extreme cases a
| company can be forced to stop trading for a period of days or
| weeks. Companies are so scared of this happening to them that
| a significant portion of orientation for new employees is
| spent on it. I don't have stats on how effective it is, but I
| do know that the public is less willing to accept it as they
| tend to elsewhere.
| PacificSpecific wrote:
| Wow good for them. I wish we took it that seriously in
| North America.
| Hakkin wrote:
| Is this true? KADOKAWA had a massive hack last year that
| leaked a large amount of sensitive user data and as far as
| I know has faced no legal repercussions. Obviously they
| took a decent financial and reputational hit, but that was
| just an effect of the hack itself, not any government
| intervention.
| sixtyj wrote:
| GDPR has fines:
|
| Up to EUR 10,000,000 or up to 2% of the total worldwide
| annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is
| higher; applies to infringements such as controller and
| processor obligations, security of processing, record-
| keeping, and breach notification duties.
|
| Up to EUR 20,000,000 or up to 4% of the total worldwide
| annual turnover of the preceding financial year, whichever is
| higher; applies to infringements of basic principles for
| processing, data subjects' rights, and unlawful transfers of
| personal data to third countries or international
| organisations.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Sure, in principle. Have you heard of any company that
| suffered any significant hardship (say, stock price
| plummeting, personnel reductions, bankruptcy) because of
| one of these fines?
| jamiecurle wrote:
| Specific to the UK, there's a list of enforcement actions
| that the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) have
| taken:
|
| https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/enforcement/
|
| Some went to prison, some were fined PS14M and it's a
| mixture of small fry and big fry.
| dangus wrote:
| These fines aren't something you're responsible for paying
| by merely being breached. These are imposed for misconduct
| in data handling.
|
| It's not very hard to handle customer data in a legally
| compliant way, that's why you don't see companies deciding
| against retaining data.
|
| You can do everything right and still have a data breach,
| and in that case nobody is fining you.
| Spivak wrote:
| Infra engineer here. The obvious reasons for needing the data
| is debugging. I collect logs, metrics, traces, and errors from
| everywhere, including clients. All of these come with
| identifying information including the associated user. From the
| perspective of this thread this is a huge amount of data
| although it's pretty modest compared to the wider industry.
|
| This data is _the_ tool we have to identify and fix bugs. It is
| considered a failing on our end if a user has to report an
| issue to us. Mullvad is in an ideal situation to not need this
| data because their customers are technical, identical, and
| stateless.
|
| It's not my department but I think we would get laughed out of
| the room if we told our users that we couldn't do password
| resets or support SSO let alone the whole forgetting your
| 'credential' means losing all your data thing.
| al_borland wrote:
| > Mullvad is in an ideal situation to not need this data
| because their customers are technical, identical, and
| stateless.
|
| A lot of companies could be in similar situations, but choose
| not to be.
|
| All of retail, for example. Target does significant amounts
| of data collection to track their customers. This is a
| choice. They could let users simply buy things, pay for them,
| and store nothing. This used to be the business model. For
| online orders, they could purge everything after the return
| window passed. The order data shouldn't be needed after that.
| For brick and mortar, it should be a very straightforward
| business. However, I'm routinely asked for my zip code or
| phone number when I check out at stores. Loyalty cards are
| also a way to incentivize customers to give up this data
| (https://xkcd.com/2006/).
|
| TVs are another big one. They are all "smart" now, and
| collect significant amounts of data. I don't know anyone who
| would be upset with a simple screen that just let you change
| inputs and brightness settings, and let people plug stuff
| into it. Nothing needs to be collected or phone home.
|
| A lot of the logs that are collected in the name of
| troubleshooting and bug fixing exist because the products are
| over-complicated or not thoroughly tested before release. The
| ability to update things later lowers the bar for release and
| gives a pass for adding all this complexity that users don't
| really want. There is a lot of complexity in the smart TV
| that they might want logs for, but none of it improves the
| user experience, it's all in support of the real business
| model that's hidden from the user.
| eleveriven wrote:
| What I'd really like to see is more honesty: "we store X
| because feature Y needs it, here's the risk we're accepting,"
| instead of pretending every service needs emails, analytics,
| and cookies by default
| teekert wrote:
| This is what the GDPR requires.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| >Any business that isn't willing to be as anonymous as Mullvad,
| I assume has a compromised business model that I don't really
| like
|
| Well, that's like 99% of the businesses out there. Mind listing
| of some of the businesses you like aside from obvious mullvad?
| al_borland wrote:
| I wish I had a list, as you said, they are in short supply.
| If there is a site out there that catalogs simple
| straightforward business that don't compromise a customers
| ability to be anonymous, I'd like it very much.
|
| A HN user posted about a site they made for faxing documents
| the other day. It's a good example of how I think most things
| should be setup in many cases. You pay a fee and it sends a
| fax, that is very simple to understand. There are no accounts
| and the documents are only stored long enough to fulfill the
| service.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46310161
|
| You can imagine how most "modern" sites would handle faxing.
| Make an account, link a credit card, provide your address to
| validate the credit card. Then store all the faxes that were
| sent, claiming it's for easy reference. Meanwhile it's
| running OCR on them in the background to build a profile with
| a wealth of personal data. After all, people don't tend to
| fax trivial things. In addition to the profits from the user,
| they are making a killing on selling data to advertisers...
| but those details are hidden away in legalese of the fine
| print in a policy no one actually reads.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| What scares me is that the more privacy oriented you are, the
| easier you are to fingerprint. At what point does privacy mean
| blending in with the crowd and not sticking out?
| ybceo wrote:
| You're thinking about browser fingerprinting (client-side), but
| my post is about service-level anonymity (server-side).
|
| Browser fingerprinting: "Your unique combination of
| extensions/settings makes you identifiable among other users."
|
| Service anonymity: "There are no other users to compare you
| against because we don't collect identifying data."
|
| When you sign up with just a random 32-char string, there's
| nothing to fingerprint. No email to correlate. No IP logs to
| analyze. No usage patterns to build a profile from.
|
| Fingerprinting matters when services collect behavioral data.
| We architected our way out of having that data to begin with.
| integralid wrote:
| >When you sign up with just a random 32-char string...
|
| There's STILL a browser fingerprint, IP logs to analyze,
| usage patterns to build a profile from. You may claim you
| don't collect it, but users need to take your word for it.
| This is just pseudonymity, which (as many BTC users found
| out) only gets you halfway there. Real anonymity is way
| harder, often impossible.
|
| Don't get me wrong, it's good to see organisations that care
| about privacy and in fact this blog post encouraged me to
| consider your services in the future. We have some use cases
| for that at work.
|
| Though by using cloudflare you're NOT putting your money
| where your mouth is.
| ybceo wrote:
| I was going to say making the platform open source might
| solve this problem, but then users would have to trust that
| we are actually running the open source version and not
| some fork with logging and tracking. This would be an
| interesting problem / paradox to try to crack.
|
| But you are 100% right, I will look into alternatives for
| Cloudflare, which we are using because it seems like the
| cloud hosting industry LOVES to DDoS new players.
| mazone wrote:
| I wonder if it would be possible to allow people to ssh
| into the edge servers with enough access to verify no
| access logs are stored but not enough to cause any
| problems. Admit i have not thought it through but would
| be cool having people verify the live environment while
| running.
| dns_snek wrote:
| You can't really verify anything in this way. SSH is just
| a protocol, you're trusting the SSH server to give you a
| shell inside the real production environment instead of
| giving you a shell inside some elaborate simulation of a
| production environment. It's about as trustworthy as a
| policy page saying "we don't keep logs".
| dns_snek wrote:
| With open source software + reproducible system image
| builds + TPM + secure boot + remote attestation you could
| technically achieve some level of certainty that the
| server is running the software that you expect, but
| that's not enough.
|
| The operator can passively log the network traffic which
| allows for de-anonymization and you would need to design
| your application-layer such that the operator couldn't
| selectively route your traffic to a non-compliant server.
| o999 wrote:
| There are self-hostable solutions for DDoS protection,
| try Anubis for example.
| integralid wrote:
| TBH most of those problems are solved by using tor
| browser. Depending on how much you care: 1. make it
| possible to use your service with Tor browser, 2. create
| an .onion site 3. delete your clearnet presence and use
| only tor.
|
| Without (1), people who really care about anonymity won't
| even care about you (tor is table stakes). (3) is a
| really strong vote for anonymity, but don't expect many
| customers that way.
| bauruine wrote:
| Blending in with the crowd doesn't work. If you use Chrome on
| Windows you're part of a very large group and "don't stick
| out". But it's also very easy to fingerprint so you're also
| part of the "theturtletalks" group with the size of one.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Reminds me of this guy who used Tor to send a fake bomb threat
| to his school but he was the only person on the whole campus
| connecting to Tor.
| immibis wrote:
| There were 4 people, but he confessed when questioned.
|
| I guess the lesson there is that if you don't want to be
| convicted of a crime, don't confess to a crime? They _won 't_
| give you a lighter sentence for confessing.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| > I guess the lesson there is that if you don't want to be
| convicted of a crime, don't confess to a crime? They won't
| give you a lighter sentence for confessing.
|
| Ever hear of moral integrity?
|
| Unless the penalty is unjust (say, execution for a minor
| crime), a just man will confess and accept his punishment
| as right as just. He himself will want justice to be done
| and will want to pay for his crime.
|
| A remorseful murderer knows he deserves death. He might ask
| for mercy, but failing that, he will accept the penalty
| with dignity and grace.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Whatever you smoke, share it.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| This is the kind of value a population can collectively
| hold until they look around and see the culture doesn't
| value it anymore. Moral integrity stopped being a
| cultural value that mattered here before I was even born,
| if it ever really did matter for anyone except the
| "common" man.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Honestly, I don't care about what the culture does. I act
| with integrity because of _my_ values and who I want to
| be, not because I 'm under any illusions about how many
| of my peers will do the same. It is, in my opinion, the
| only way to live well.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _"...the only person on the whole campus connecting to Tor.
| "_
|
| Talk about doubly stupid, first sending the threat, second
| using Tor on campus. I often wonder what goes (or doesn't go)
| through the mind of such people.
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| Not necessarily
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46334951
| eleveriven wrote:
| There's a point where "privacy" flips into distinctiveness
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > At what point does privacy mean blending in with the crowd
| and not sticking out?
|
| It's basically rule number one. Tor is all about making all
| users look like the same user. The so called anonymity set.
| They all look the same, so you can't tell them apart from each
| other.
|
| It's also part of the rules of proper OPSEC.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moscow_rules
|
| > Do not look back; you are never completely alone.
|
| > Go with the flow, blend in.
|
| > Vary your pattern and stay within your cover.
| theturtletalks wrote:
| I read here that most of the Tor exit nodes are operated by
| governments and governments are using parallel construction
| to keep that information out of legal documents.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Well, yes. They control ISPs and exit nodes, therefore they
| can correlate entries into and exits out of the Tor
| network, narrowing down candidate lists until only one user
| remains. Essentially a nation scale version of the Harvard
| bomb threat correlation:
|
| https://buttondown.com/grugq/archive/bad-opsec-considered-
| ha...
|
| As noted in the article, it wasn't the failure of Tor that
| led to arrest, it was poor OPSEC. Failure to cover, failure
| to conceal and failure to compartment.
| duskdozer wrote:
| Maybe ironically - just going on the title because I can't read
| the rest as a result - it's behind a cloudflare gate.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| I would much rather have privacy with e2e encryption than have
| anonymity. The way that works is a direct connection between two
| parties without use of a central server, like webRTC.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Sadly, everybody using a browser from a massive ad company and an
| idp (not to mention a company with an interest in crawling the
| entire web for AI at the same time site owners are dealing with
| better scrapers) means the entire web will be login-only over
| time.
| bigyabai wrote:
| I don't see how those points bolster your conclusion. These
| pressures predate AI by over a decade and haven't forced a
| significant tidal change in the way the internet is used.
| squigz wrote:
| We're quite a few years into this period of technology. At a
| certain point, these "AI is going to kill the web!" predictions
| either need to come true or just be dismissed as false.
| eleveriven wrote:
| The irony is that the same companies pushing us toward login-
| only everything are also the ones best positioned to survive it
| sloppppp wrote:
| This was authored using an LLM, wasn't it. The style is
| unmistakable. Stop wasting our time with this slop.
| politelemon wrote:
| Here's the thing. It's not just x, it's hyperbole y. Hyperbole.
| Y.
| abnercoimbre wrote:
| Yeeeep. I'm very disappointed because the subject matter is
| important.
| 152334H wrote:
| thank you. absurd no other comments noticed
| karanSF wrote:
| I can't stand the style as much as the excessive use of
| hyphens. The "It's not just ..., it's ...." every 5 sentences
| is too much once you notice it. However, every LLM seems to
| converge on this style. It wouldn't wouldn't write like that if
| it didn't work to some degree, so maybe it knows something we
| don't.
| armchairhacker wrote:
| tl;dr "Privacy" = the data is private i.e. only on your devices.
| Or if the raw data is public but encrypted and the key is
| private, I think that qualifies.
|
| "Anonymity" = the data is public but not linked to its owner's
| identity.
|
| If you're sharing your data with a website (e.g. storing it
| unencrypted), but they promise not to leak it, the data is only
| "private" between you and them...which doesn't mean much, because
| they may not (and sometimes cannot) keep that promise. But if the
| website doesn't attribute the data except to a randomly-generated
| identifier (or e.g. RSA public key), the data is anonymous.
| That's the article.
|
| Although a server does provide real privacy if it stores user
| data encrypted and doesn't store the key, and you can verify this
| if you have the client's unobfuscated source.
|
| Also note that anonymity is less secure than privacy because the
| information provides clues to the owner. e.g. if it's a detailed
| report on a niche topic with a specific bias and one person is
| known to be super interested in that topic with that bias, or if
| it contains parts of the owner's PII. But it's much better than
| nothing.
| jacquesm wrote:
| There is no such thing as anonymity. With the number of bits
| required to ID a person and the fact that you are leaking such
| bits _all the time_ you can simply forget about anonymity.
|
| Many people online seem to think that they are anonymous and so
| were emboldened to do stuff that they might not have done if they
| had realized this. They continued to feel extremely good at this
| right up until the knock on the door.
| schmuckonwheels wrote:
| Well there's anonymity from authorities, and there's anonymity
| from garden variety lunatics.
|
| There exists a grey area between not getting away with
| nefarious activities, and not having your life ruined by a
| lynch mob because you didn't approve their preferred CoC on a
| hobby project or some other perceived injustice.
| pona-a wrote:
| Is there? The government apparatus that's meant to
| investigate these crimes is the same one elected by the mob.
|
| If you find yourself a member of any group a campaign can
| mobilize the mob against, that entire investigatory apparatus
| can be turned against you.
|
| Without privacy, we are doomed to endless purity purges.
| wisty wrote:
| > realized
|
| Most UK and Australian writers would spell it "realised" so
| there's a bit right there.
|
| Even if you include no personal information, there is
| information in writing style.
|
| Stylometry is the study of this. Yes, there's also adversarial
| stylometry - distorting your writing style to fool an analysis.
| It's probably effective now, but that could change overnight
| and every archived post that every OSINT organisation has
| collected is deanomynised.
|
| Yeah you can say "I change my style". But there's some bits
| that don't have false positives. If I EVER say "praise the
| omminsiah" I'm definetly _au fait_ in 40k memes. If I ever say
| _au fait_ I 'm a person who has at least a rough idea of what
| it means. There's no false positive here, so if you can just
| find about 29 undeniable uncorrelated bits that are known to
| not have false positives ... a more advanced analysis could
| exploit this in a more continuous way (e.g. the likelihood of
| it being a false positive). I should shut up now.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" Stylometry is the study of this."_
|
| It's as old as history. In the days super-abbreviated
| telegrams (words were costly) you could even get two for the
| price of one--the author and the Morse code operator who
| actually sent the telegram. He could be recognized by his
| Morse fist, other Morse operators on the network would
| recognize him by the style of his sending even though they
| were only listening to dots and dashes,
| integralid wrote:
| Stop with that doom and gloom. You can absolutely be anonymous
| online if you want to and have some basic technical knowledge
| (every HN reader does).
|
| I could try to prove it to you, but the only proof you need is
| that cybercrime exists and millions (or tens of millions) of
| dollars are stolen every day. If anonymity didn't exist it
| would be easy to stop this, wouldn't it?
| Prunkton wrote:
| What I was wondering after reading the article: How does Mulvad
| actually decouple banking data from the account ID? Or is it as
| simple as verify transaction once but never log?
| stanislavb wrote:
| I think they remove the invoice after a month. You can also,
| send them cash in an envelope
| komali2 wrote:
| So there's no subscription thing going on, you just manually
| pay invoices?
|
| I once spent an entire year issuing chargebacks on AWS
| charges coming from god knows what AWS account. Most likely
| some client project I forgot about and didn't have the login
| to anymore, who knows. Makes me think about that - for a
| service where you can't login if you lose the credentials,
| how do you cancel a subscription? In my case I had to
| eventually just cancel the credit card and get a new number.
| deafpolygon wrote:
| No subscription. It's pay as you go. You top up $X and you
| get X months. That's it. If your month expires, it expires.
| Just top off and you're good to go.
| pxc wrote:
| You can pay with an envelope of cash, so they don't need your
| banking data to begin with.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Perhaps so, but that's damn difficult or very risky for all
| but a very select few.
| pxc wrote:
| Because you can't mail cash? Or it won't be delivered
| without a return address
| guuger wrote:
| Europe is currently being tormented by this exact contradiction:
| on one hand, it has the GDPR--the world's strictest privacy law,
| supposedly protecting personal data; on the other, a flood of new
| regulations under the banners of "child safety," "counter-
| terrorism," and "anti-money laundering" are systematically
| strangling real anonymity.
| mk89 wrote:
| At first I thought it was a blog. No, this is a company. So,
| their privacy page (https://servury.com/privacy/):
|
| > Server Logs > Like all web services, our servers may log: > IP
| addresses of visitors > Request timestamps > User agent strings >
| These logs are used for security and debugging purposes and are
| not linked to your account.
|
| That's already a huge breach in comparison to mullvad privacy
| page. (https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy)
| afro88 wrote:
| > That's already a huge breach in comparison to mullvad privacy
| page.
|
| And the "3 data points, that's it" of the blog post
| ybceo wrote:
| Those data points refer to what is stored in the database and
| is tied to your 32 character credential.
|
| Web server logs were not tied to user credentials in any way.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| IPs are PII. They can be tied to an identity.
| organsnyder wrote:
| Even user agents are often specific enough to be
| considered PII.
| IlikeKitties wrote:
| I mean technically yes but I find THAT kind of logging utterly
| benign.
| procaryote wrote:
| They're good enough for fingerprinting and matching against
| other logs.
|
| Also:
|
| > // What we DON'T collect:
|
| > - IP addresses (not logged, not stored, not tracked)
|
| > - Usage patterns (no analytics, no telemetry, nothing)
|
| > - Device fingerprints (your browser, your business)
|
| so, I've read one blog from this company, and already they're
| lying or incompetent
| tensegrist wrote:
| i hate to point it out, but that was written by an llm that
| probably wasn't prompted precisely enough to not make up
| comforting thoughts like that
| pxc wrote:
| Indeed, the whole thing reads like it was written by an
| LLM.
| ybceo wrote:
| I agree 100%. I went ahead and disabled all logging in Apache
| just now. Will update the privacy page to reflect this within
| the hour.
| drink_machine wrote:
| Shouldn't you have spent some time to think through basic
| things like this before trying to write an opinion piece on
| anonymity? Certainly it shows a lack of depth of
| understanding.
| ybceo wrote:
| I disagree. Like I said earlier :
|
| Web server logs were not tied to user credentials in any
| way, they were used for debugging purposes and could not
| have been used to identify users.
| procaryote wrote:
| From your faq: "We maintain zero logs of your activities.
| We don't track IP addresses, ..."
|
| Front page says "zero logs"
|
| Some logs, including specifically datapoints you have
| promised not to log, but you mean well (?) is pretty
| different from zero logs
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Fwiw, zero logs in that context is usually in the
| relation to requests through the VPN, whereas this
| discussion is about requests on their homepage? Or did I
| misunderstand something here?
| pear01 wrote:
| You disagree and yet you agreed 100% and made the change.
| I thought the point the preceding parent comment is
| making is that you should have thought of that
| beforehand. Yet you seemed to already come to a judgement
| about it yet then quickly agreed to reverse yourself.
|
| Sounds like a clear "lack of a depth of understanding" to
| me.
| organsnyder wrote:
| I have a static IP address; and most connections tend to
| have long-lived leases anyways. It can easily be used to
| identify me, even if you don't explicitly tie it to my
| account.
| everdrive wrote:
| The privacy crowd seems to be incapable of grey areas. Are
| all these the same thing? Are they all the same severity of
| problem? - A web site logs traffic in a
| sort of defacto way, but no one actually reviews the
| traffic, and it's not sent to 3rd parties. - A
| government website uses a standard framework and that
| framework loads a google subdomain. In principle, Google
| could use this to track you but there's no evidence that
| this actually happens. - A website tracks user
| sessions so they can improve UI but don't sell that data to
| 3rd parties. - A website has many 3rd party
| domains, many of which are tracking domains. -
| Facebook knows exactly who you are and sells your
| information to real-time-bidding ad services. -
| Your cell phone's 3G connection must in principle
| triangulate you for the cell phone to function, but the
| resolution here is fuzzy. - You use Android and
| even when your GPS is turned "off" Google is still getting
| extremely high resolution of your location at all times and
| absolutely using that information to target you.
|
| A LOT of the privacy folks would put all those examples in
| the same category, and it absolutely drives me up a wall.
| It's purity-seeking at the expense of any meaningful
| distinction, or any meaningful investigation that actually
| allows uses to make informed decisions about their privacy.
| Rygian wrote:
| They belong in the same category: the end user has zero
| agency over how their privacy is impacted, and is at the
| whim of the wishes/agency of whoever is serving content
| to them.
|
| Whether the one serving the content is exploiting data
| _at the present moment_ has very little relevance.
| Because the end user has no means to assert whether it is
| happening or not.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > - A web site logs traffic in a sort of defacto way, but
| no one actually reviews the traffic, and it's not sent to
| 3rd parties.
|
| Even if this sounds innocent, these must be turned over
| if you are provided a warrant or subpoena (which ever
| would be appropriate, IANAL).
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The issue isn't about the present but the future. You
| don't just assume Google one day won't try to compromise
| government data.
|
| Even if they don't, it opens up more attack vectors for
| malicious 3rd parties who want that data. That's why you
| can't be careless.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| That is paranoia.
|
| At any time any company could turn evil, and any
| free(ish) government could become totalitarian overnight.
| This is a fact, but also pretty useless one.
|
| The real questions to ask are, how likely it is to
| happen, and if that happens, how much did all these
| privacy measures accomplish.
|
| The answer to those are, "not very", and "not much".
|
| Down here on Earth, there are more real and immediate
| issues to consider, and balance to be found between
| preventing current and future misuse of data by public
| and private parties of all sides, while sharing enough
| data to be able to have a functioning technological
| civilization.
|
| Useful conversations and realistic solutions are all
| about those grey areas.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >At any time any company could turn evil, and any
| free(ish) government could become totalitarian overnight.
| This is a fact, but also pretty useless one.
|
| Is it isrlsss paranoia when it's happening around us as
| we speak?
|
| It's strange how we call it "preparation" to spend
| trillions of dollars on mobilizing a military, but
| "paranoia" to simply take some best practices and not
| have the citizen's data dangling around. Its a much
| cheaper aspect with huge results, like much of tech.
|
| I live in a good neighborhood and I have left my door
| unlocked once or twice to no consequence. That doesn't
| mean it's paranoia to make a habit out of locking my
| doors.
|
| That's all I assert here. Care and effort. I don't know
| all the subtle steps to take since I'm not in
| cybersecurit, but we still shouldn't excuse sloppiness.
| amarant wrote:
| We all mess up and miss things, op has shown maturity
| enough to admit to their mistakes and improve from them.
|
| My takeaway from this thread is an increased amount of
| trust in OP. Not because they made a mistake, but because
| of how they handled it. Well done OP!
| ljlolel wrote:
| The whole thing is behind cloudflare!
| megous wrote:
| Anonymity is responsibility of a visitor in any case. If
| the visitor's anonymity depends on some website not storing
| logs, the visitor lost already.
| reactordev wrote:
| Your browser knows more about you than you do. When
| accessing a website, anonymous or not, it sends a
| fingerprint so to speak to that site and its ad network.
| It's there that your anonymity ceases and you are
| identified, classified, segmented, and fed more "How to
| stay safe online" ads. There's no escaping it. Chromium
| is not to be trusted.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| in 2025, can small and medium businesses afford to be
| exposed to the world wild web? You don't need to be a major
| site these days to be DDosed on the regular
| V__ wrote:
| Who gets ddosed on the regular? Spam is a regular
| problem, but I have never encountered a ddos on a
| business website.
| encom wrote:
| Baseless fear mongering. I've had webservers raw-dogging
| the Internet for about 25 years. Nothing of any
| consequence has happened. Hasn't happened to anyone I
| know, either. Anecdata yes, but people are making it
| sound like running a webserver is like connecting a
| Windows XP machine to the internet - instant pwnage. It
| isn't.
|
| I've been DDoS'ed exactly once. In 2003 I got into a
| pointless internet argument on IRC, and my home
| connection got hammered, which of course made me lose the
| argument by default. I activated my backup ISDN, so my
| Diablo 2 game was barely interrupted.
| hollerith wrote:
| >I've had webservers
|
| But have those webservers supported a small or medium-
| sized business?
| trollbridge wrote:
| Mine do, although I do use Cloudflare.
|
| I've periodically removed Cloudflare because of issues
| with reissuing SSL certs, Cloudflare being down, and
| other reasons, and haven't noticed any problems.
|
| The biggest benefit I get from Cloudflare is blocking
| scraper robots, which I've just been too lazy to figure
| out how to do myself.
| sdoering wrote:
| Mine did. Mine do. Never a problem. Not once.
| immibis wrote:
| Despite what Cloudflare wants you to think, yes, yes they
| can.
|
| Also you can sue whoever DDoSes you and put them in jail.
| It's easier than it used to be, since the internet is
| heavily surveilled now. The malicious actors with really
| good anonymity aren't wasting it attacking a nobody.
| mk89 wrote:
| Are you allowed to do that in US? I see the company is
| located in the USA, can companies disable logging just like
| that?
|
| (Asking because I really don't know)
| immibis wrote:
| In most countries the law doesn't say you have to log
| everything about your users, but it does say that if you
| log it and the police ask for it then you have to give the
| data to them.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| I think you mean if a court asks for it. And they have to
| ask for something you actually have
| immibis wrote:
| That's why companies that actually care about privacy (I
| think there are only two - Mullvad and Signal?) make a
| point of not ever capturing the data to begin with, and
| deleting what they do capture as soon as possible.
| singpolyma3 wrote:
| Interesting that you mention those two as I'd not trust
| either with private data. They engage in too much magical
| thinking in their marketing for my liking...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I don't know either, but I would guess there are no laws
| that says internet service operators _must_ log anything.
|
| But, banks and financial services now must obey "know your
| customer" laws so it's not beyond imagination that similar
| laws could be applied to websites and ISPs operating in a
| particular country.
| sdoering wrote:
| Does it matter, when CF is collecting all that already before
| people even reach your site?
| zbentley wrote:
| Does CF matter, when intermediate ISPs are collecting IP
| address and DNS query activity and can be subpoenaed?
|
| The answer to both this and parent is _yes_ : partial
| privacy improvements are still improvements. There are two
| big reasons for this and many smaller reasons as well:
|
| First, legal actors prioritize who to take action against;
| some cases are "worth seeing if $law-enforcement-agency can
| get logs from self-hosted or colo'd servers with minimal
| legal trouble" but not "worth subpoenaing cloudflare/a vpn
| provider/ISP for logs that turned out not to be stored on
| the servers that received the traffic".
|
| Second, illegal actors are a lot more likely to break into
| your servers and be able to see traffic information than
| they are to be able to break into cloudflare/vpn/ISP
| infrastructure. Sure, most attackers aren't interested in
| logs. But many of the kind of websites whose logs law
| enforcement is interested in are also interesting to
| blackmailers.
| dylan604 wrote:
| If the authorities come to TFA site with demands, they
| can't do anything about what CF is doing. All they can do
| is turn over what they have, and/or prove they don't have
| what is being asked of them. What some 3rd party does is
| not germane at all.
| willtemperley wrote:
| I initially liked the sentiment but the offering doesn't appear
| to add up. Unfortunately the real private cloud, if it exists,
| is bare metal and can't really be sold as a subscription.
| zwnow wrote:
| How tf are you supposed to provide working authentication without
| storing the email somewhere? Should i just disable password
| resets and tell the users to fuck off if they forget theirs? Cant
| even use passkeys as they make users identifiable too.
| K0balt wrote:
| Users need to have hard memorization or record of a paraphrase,
| same as a crypto wallet. Or just use web3 for auth, that can
| work well if users have decent opsec.
| wrxd wrote:
| That's a trade off if you don't want the service to know who
| you are
| pona-a wrote:
| How do passkeys make users identifiable beyond being a random
| token? I recall FIDO shared hardware key serial numbers with
| websites, but at least on Firefox, it prompts you to deny it.
| zwnow wrote:
| In that case one could argue emails dont make users
| identifiable either, if the addresses dont contain any
| meaningful names
| pona-a wrote:
| A passkey is always one per site. Emails tend to be
| naturally reused, unless the visitor uses a paid aliasing
| service (plus trick is trivial to canonize, having a dozen
| mailboxes on a self-hosted email still associates them with
| each other, because there's no anonymity set to speak of,
| and major email providers like Gmail won't let you register
| an account today without a phone number, credit card, or
| passport).
| zwnow wrote:
| And yet your passkey and therefore app access is tied to
| a singular key connecting that with all the user info.
| DerSaidin wrote:
| One difference with Mullvad is VPN traffic is ephemeral. Here, a
| VPS has a persistent disk attached, that could contain
| identifying information (if it is necessary to do useful work).
| p4bl0 wrote:
| The very premise is false, privacy does mean something, and
| anonymity doesn't really exists. This is an advertisement.
| politelemon wrote:
| I agree, privacy still means a lot. It's a term that's been co-
| opted by the large tech companies which operate with impunity.
| It will has meaning that cannot change.
|
| The post also misunderstands privacy
|
| > Privacy is when they promise to protect your data.
|
| Privacy is about you controlling your data. Promises are simply
| social contracts.
| pogue wrote:
| Glad I had to do a Cloudflare turnstile captcha to see this page
| mnw21cam wrote:
| Apparently neither does spelling. "anymore" -> "any more"
| kleiba wrote:
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anymore
| IanCal wrote:
| Anymore is a word though.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| I didn't think anyone [not any one] could be more pedantic than
| I am. Damn it.
| jaclaz wrote:
| D@mn, I believed you were thinking that no one (not noone)
| could be more pedantic than you.
| metalman wrote:
| "privacy" or not sharing your space with a creepy room mate, and
| reading the internet without adds ar3 parallel
|
| running three flavors of the same off brand browser, each
| optimised for different segments of online content is what seems
| to be the minimum.
|
| they are so desperate to sell me something, (a truck) that it's
| wild, as it is one of the few monitisable things I consistently
| look for (parts, service procedures), the , pause, when I do
| certain searches gives me time to predict that yes, the machinery
| is grinding hard, and will ,shortly, triumphantly, produce, a
| ,truck.
| mnls wrote:
| According to article, the whole authorization system is flawed.
| But we haven't invent a new one and the one we've got never meant
| to be private, it is just a way to separate users from each
| other. We need something unique, a "primary key" for our DB, and
| that's email or phone or username that has to be stored
| somewhere. A server, someone else's computer, call it what you
| want. It has good privacy between users, but the admin can see
| everything, because otherwise management of the service would be
| impossible.
|
| There is no anonymity, there is always someone you have to trust
| in the chain of WAN networking (DNS,ISP,VPN). If you want
| anonymity and privacy, you selfhost (examining the code is also a
| prerequisite). There is no other way to do it.
| wrxd wrote:
| > but the admin can see everything, because otherwise
| management of the service would be impossible.
|
| It depends on what service you're offering. There are many
| cases where you can have end-to-end encryption so that you can
| know who your users are, host their data but cannot do anything
| with it.
| qwertyuiop12 wrote:
| the only way is "anonymity by design". history showed us that
| "don't be evil" does not work if the entity can change its mind
| unilaterally.
|
| be confident that the service is not keeping logs? JA!
| anal_reactor wrote:
| The battle on privacy/anonymity/whatever is lost. Get over it.
| What we need is a new social paradigm where everyone is happy
| despite the lack of privacy.
| pooper wrote:
| Everybody says I should be ok having no privacy and yet frown
| upon me posting photos of the poop I take on Instagram.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Yes, exactly, that's what I'm talking about. Imagine a world
| where it's completely acceptable to post poop on Instagram,
| and people who don't want to look at it simply tick "don't
| display poop". The thing is, the "if you have nothing to hide
| then you have nothing to fear" argument IS true, under
| assumption that others would be understanding and
| compassionate to your intentions. Which is exactly the
| opposite of the legal/societal system we currently have.
|
| What I'm trying to say is that the core issue is "people
| aren't trustworthy" and "we need privacy" is a bandaid on the
| former problem. If we manage to create a society where people
| are trustworthy, the need of privacy will disappear.
| iamnothere wrote:
| The core problem is that people have (and will always have)
| divergent goals, and a large subset of people see no
| problem in using coercive and even violent means to ensure
| that their own "team" wins. This is human nature and cannot
| be remedied.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| The thing is, same logic applies to other entities that
| form groups, like cells in an organism, or ants in a
| colony.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Then the government is overturned by a totalitarian clique
| that declares displaying poop punishable by death, and this
| includes any past display of poop. Suddenly you find
| yourself here unsafe { anal_reactor }
| duskdozer wrote:
| Please provide your full legal name (include any other names
| you go by), occupation and place of employment, phone
| number[s], email address[es], usernames on other social media
| accounts, eye color, height, weight, list of any health
| conditions. That's just to start, then we can start going over
| more info.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Suk Mai Dik, living in Yo Momma's Trailer, employed as Yo
| Momma's Pimp.
|
| Sorry but I just couldn't resist hehehe.
| specialist wrote:
| What's your definition of privacy?
| titzer wrote:
| > The battle on _X_ is lost. Get over it. What we need is a new
| social paradigm where everyone is happy despite the lack of
| _X_.
|
| Where have I heard this before?
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Betamax is obviously the better standard.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| Sounds like Scott McNealy in 1999. At the time I hated the
| idea, but have to admit now his viewpoint is winning and on
| the way to won.
| nilslindemann wrote:
| And, also not very funny, those corps never tell in advance which
| data they "require". They grab my mail on "the first page" of the
| registration form. Then, on "the second page", they ask for my
| phone and my address. Should I decide to agree to this, they will
| finally tell me on "the third page", that they only support
| credit card, no PayPal, no direct payment via Bank ...
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| This seems like the wrong end of the system to fix the problem.
| Someone saying "we don't log your IP address" isn't something you
| can easily verify, so the promise doesn't mean much because if
| they suck they're just going to lie about it.
|
| What you need instead is to make it _easy_ and _common_ for
| people to use browsers that resist fingerprinting, VPNs /Tor,
| custom email addresses per-account, etc. Because then instead of
| claiming to not log your information, they simply do not have it.
|
| The biggest thing we need is a better way to pay someone over the
| internet without them knowing who you are.
| HelloUsername wrote:
| > The biggest thing we need is a better way to pay someone over
| the internet without them knowing who you are.
|
| Cryptocurrency?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| If it was made easy and common for ordinary people to use.
| abc123abc123 wrote:
| True. For 99% of the people mining it yourself of demanding
| getting paid in crypto is not viable. That means you go to
| an exchange, and all you do is then logged at this
| government regulated exchange.
|
| I suppose you could engage in some cloak and dagger
| exchange at night, but again, the 99% won't do that. The
| ones who do, are most likely capable of setting up their
| own services, anonymously, so they don't need to have a
| commercial, for-profit as their middleman.
| wseqyrku wrote:
| That's what I thought. I think an open source crypto payment
| gateway that "just works" could probably make it more
| prevalent. (Is there any?)
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Isn't that pretty much table stakes for being a
| cryptocurrency? Run a node (they're all open source),
| publish your address, and you're all set up to receive
| payments in that currency.
|
| Every one I've tried "just works". The trick is getting
| people to join you.
| wseqyrku wrote:
| > Every one I've tried "just works". The trick is getting
| people to join you.
|
| As the other comment pointed out, if it's easy enough,
| that problem will take care of itself. I would also add
| "lightweight", cloning the entire block is not something
| everyone would do.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| _" The biggest thing we need is a better way to pay someone
| over the internet without them knowing who you are."_
|
| I've been saying that for years. Buy a prepaid card for cash at
| say the supermarket with xyz value on it and a unique email
| address included (an anonymous debit card with email). That is
| every new card you buy would have a different disposable email
| address that would expire when the card is empty.
|
| Such a scheme could also be used to donate micro payments to
| opensource projects, ad-free Youtubers, etc. and do so
| anonymously. Moreover, it would make payments easier thus
| overcome the "requires effort to do" resistance when it comes
| to donating. Making donating super easy would I reckon greatly
| increase the income for all those on the receiving end.
|
| However I can't see it happening, governments would outlaw it
| claiming it'd be used to transfer money for nefarious purposes,
| money laundering etc.
|
| The major reason I don't donate to good/charitable causes is
| that I cannot do so anonymously.
|
| Shame really.
| _el1s7 wrote:
| > The biggest thing we need is a better way to pay someone over
| the internet without them knowing who you are.
|
| What's the reason you don't want sellers to know who you are?
|
| That would be like buying things in real life while wearing a
| ski mask and paying with cash.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| What's the reason for the seller to know who I am?
|
| Any normal pre-total-surveillance store would've had zero
| issues selling me something for cash if I walked in wearing a
| ski mask.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That is not remotely true, dude. Probably some stores
| would've been ok with it. But for the past 40 years or
| more, wearing a ski mask around has had the connotation of
| "this person is up to no good". A lot of stores would've
| had a problem with your hypothetical purchase for quite
| some time now.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| So my understanding is, what Mullvad is to VPNs, and what Tarsnap
| is to S3 (kinda), Servury is to entire VMs. It's a prepaid model,
| you get an account identifier, and that's basically it.
|
| This is very cool. I have wondered for a very long time why such
| a site does not exist. What pops to mind is that you could get
| better unit economics reselling _really small_ VMs to the privacy
| obsessed. I know some netizens who would pay a dollar a month
| for, say, a tiny NetBSD VM and 64 MB of RAM to serve their tiny
| static demoscene website of yore. There are some real wizards of
| there.
|
| Not sure if that's in your roadmap but definitely something to
| consider in this space.
| fithisux wrote:
| Is this a joke?
| bfkwlfkjf wrote:
| Speaking of mullvad. I recently learned about mullvad browser,
| which is basically tor browser minus connecting via the your
| network. This is interesting because the tor project has put the
| most effort into fingerprinting resistance. If you care about
| privacy and you have a customized browser, you're likely uniquely
| finger printable [1]. If you don't want to connect via tor,
| there's no excuse not to use the mullvad browser. (Doesn't
| require you to use mullvad VPN; comes with the mullvad plugin,
| disabled by default, to optionally use mullvad encrypted DNS.
| Last point, I wrote to the tor project and asked "is it possible
| to use tor browser minus tor network", and they responded "that's
| the mullvad browser", so this isn't just my recommendation)
|
| [1] https://coveryourtracks.eff.org
| eleveriven wrote:
| Most people fixate on network-level anonymity and completely
| underestimate how badly a "tuned" browser leaks identity
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| People also tend to have very poor OPSEC which undermines
| their efforts in spite of the tools they used.
|
| https://grugq.github.io/blog/2013/11/06/required-reading/
|
| Unlinking one's identity from one's activity is only getting
| harder as surveillance gets more and more pervasive.
| Effective OPSEC essentially turns one's life into a living
| hell and it's only getting hotter with time.
| basedrum wrote:
| Fun fact, mullvad browser is created by Tor in collaboration
| with them.
| vladyslavfox wrote:
| > Privacy is Marketing. Anonymity is Architecture.
|
| But in order to read the article you need to enable JS. What a
| joke.
| hilbert42 wrote:
| Exactly. I run sans JS by default. At least this warns me to
| either avoid the site or to take the risk (browser button--red
| for JS block, green unblock).
| bobbyschmidd wrote:
| it's 2025. chances are you had peeps in class/uni who are now in
| the Stasi networks of informants and/or in some more or less
| obscure agency or more or less related private company so your
| anonymity only works from birth and even then only if you are
| lucky or your family "gets it" and has resources and brains
| beyond.
|
| some people believe supply chain attacks are rare and hard to
| pull off and expensive and only valuable in extreme cases but if
| you ever worked at a local delivery service or pharmacy or
| something other where people and the necessary machines are being
| aggregated in some basements or even backrooms for all use cases
| from all times for wholesale forgery and fiddling with people,
| you know that the situation is ugly, not bad. throw in the many
| coders, network engineers and hardware specialists with ties to
| above entities and bombaclat, Jahmunkey, we fucked!
|
| #TheEconomicsOfPunchedDrugs #Automation #DataAnalysis
| #SituationalAssessment #HeyIsThatATurdNuggetAtTheTopOfThatPyramid
| eleveriven wrote:
| Even if you don't want to live entirely on the anonymous web,
| it's useful to see how many products claim privacy while being
| structurally incapable of delivering it
| bitbasher wrote:
| It's a bit ironic the page is protected by Cloudflare. So, all of
| our traffic is going through some other company to log and track
| before it gets to you, eh?
| derelicta wrote:
| Good luck guys, you will surely attract the attention of Feds
| very quickly.
| jrm4 wrote:
| Thank you, op, for bringing sanity to this whole thing.
|
| Relatedly, this is why I think every "new" social media service
| that isn't Mastodon is barking up the most wrong tree with "take
| everything with you," you're essentially helping to build an
| _even harder to erase_ social history.
|
| Mastodon's individual server model, like email's, is better
| PRECISELY because each node is a point of "failure." That makes
| erasure easier. Which is _good_.
| immibis wrote:
| That's not true. Mastodon replicates all your posts to a bunch
| of other servers you don't control by design, which makes them
| harder to erase.
|
| It's no worse than normal internet publishing, but it doesn't
| magically solve the erasure question.
| chneu wrote:
| No one owning your data isn't any better than everyone owning
| your data.
| basket_horse wrote:
| The problem with this in our current society is that staying
| anonymous becomes your whole identity. I have a friend who for
| the longest time didn't use Venmo, Uber, etc. because of privacy
| reasons, but the lifestyle was just not sustainable. Ultimately
| convenience killed privacy.
| stvltvs wrote:
| We have to choose where anonymity is worth the tradeoffs, but
| it's still quite possible to live without Venmo, Uber, etc.
| duskdozer wrote:
| I guess those are just examples and there are much more
| significant things, because Venmo and Uber seem far from
| indispensable.
|
| >Ultimately convenience killed privacy.
|
| By design, unfortunately.
| gruez wrote:
| >Here's how the average "privacy-focused" service actually works:
|
| > ...
|
| >5. Confirm identity for "fraud prevention" (now we have your ID)
|
| I can't tell whether OP is being hyperbolic but it's certainly
| not representative of the average "privacy-focused" service I've
| came across. The typical service only asks for an email and maybe
| billing information (can be prepaid card or crypto). The only
| exception is protonmail, which might require SMS verification[1],
| but given the problem of email spam I'm sympathetic, and it's
| bypassble by paying. It's certainly not the "average" service,
| and no service asked to "Confirm identity".
|
| [1] https://proton.me/support/human-verification
| zie wrote:
| A phone number _IS_ identity these days.
| Johnny555 wrote:
| Yeah, so many places ask for phone number that don't really
| need it that I assume the phone number is a unique identifier
| used to combine individual's data across websites.
|
| Most of the time I use a made-up 555 number or if it needs to
| send an SMS to verify, I'll use a free SMS numbers.
| ____mr____ wrote:
| > Stripe customer ID and payment method ID Wouldnt this
| information allow for the authorities to just go to Stripe and
| ask the relevant information there? Sure, you don't store exact
| personally identifying info, but you store a breadcrumb that can
| lead whoever has the power to request that information to trace
| back to the end user
| g947o wrote:
| > And for those who need traditional payments? We support
| Stripe. Because pragmatism matters. But we don't pretend that
| credit card payments are anonymous. We're honest about the
| trade-offs.
|
| I think this paragraph is clear enough about that?
| titzer wrote:
| > If you use our servers for illegal activity, law enforcement
| can still investigate. They just can't start with "who owns this
| account" because we can't answer that question.
|
| You're going to have a tussle with law enforcement, and you're
| going to lose. Your service will last < 2 years because you will
| not be able to afford the lawyers you need to defend against even
| one muscle move by the government.
|
| Good luck!
| stodor89 wrote:
| Good old "we can't decrypt your laptop but we can repeatedly
| smash your head into the table until you start cooperating"
| kyrofa wrote:
| Why? That's kind of the whole point of this: they can cooperate
| entirely and give them everything they have. You think they'll
| get into legal trouble because they aren't gathering data?
| ls612 wrote:
| You ever heard of the phrase "show me the man and I'll show
| you the crime"? These guys are gonna discover what that means
| really quickly.
| kyrofa wrote:
| There are a number of companies/products that operate under
| this principle (mullvad and signal come to mind). Are you
| saying all of those are futile and misleading? Or are you
| saying that you expect they all have significant money and
| legal teams to defend against a crooked cop's thirst for
| vengeance for not responding the way they wanted during an
| investigation?
| ls612 wrote:
| I'm saying it's only a matter of time before they get
| Pavel Durov'ed.
| svnt wrote:
| No, this is a brilliantly original way to prevent legal action
| that has never been previously conceived of in the history of
| the internet.
| specialist wrote:
| > _" privacy" has become the most abused word in tech_
|
| Ideally, an argument about privacy would start with its notion of
| privacy.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy#Conceptions_of_privacy
| bilsbie wrote:
| I'm fine with no account recovery but they would definitely need
| a major warning about that at sign up time so users can take
| extra care to save their info.
| joemazerino wrote:
| I like the idea of this but I'm a certain this article is AI
| generated.
| serial_dev wrote:
| I know it's a different context, but with this catchy title, I
| can't resist pointing out that anonymity also doesn't mean
| anything.
|
| You can have cryptocurrencies in your wallet, (on most chains)
| you are anonymous but have no privacy, your transaction history
| can be accessed by anyone.
|
| It's all fine and dandy, you can enjoy your anonymity, about as
| long as you make your first transaction.
|
| You might be anonymous, but basically you hand over your full
| transaction history and balance anytime you pay for a coffee or
| tshirt.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| you typically don't have one wallet and you (should at least
| attempt to) never reuse them either.
| wood_spirit wrote:
| Do you mean a wallet per transaction?
|
| And if you simply have multiple wallets and try and maintain
| the appearance of being disconnected, can you move funds
| between them without establishing a connection that unmasks
| you?
| kachapopopow wrote:
| well the idea is to obscure it to someone looking from the
| outside, give enough information it can still be traced -
| but that's usually only possible by infosec agencies which
| is typically what they have access to already with normal
| banks.
|
| to clarify: it can be hard to prove that two crypto
| addresses are the same people
| kube-system wrote:
| There's a whole industry of commercially available
| products that analyze blockchains transactions for the
| purpose of tracing them. Anyone can simply buy these
| services. It is functionally accurate enough to find and
| prosecute criminals.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It is functionally accurate enough to find and
| prosecute criminals.
|
| Is that a high bar? I mean, you could have said that
| about forensic fiber analysis--and then it was revealed
| that the entire history of the field was just expert
| witnesses lying their asses off for whatever conclusion
| law enforcement wanted. It turns out that to prosecute
| criminals, being complex enough that expert witnesses can
| provide a smoke screen to rationalize law enforcement
| targeting that is actually based on prejudice and not
| concrete facts can be sufficient.
| kube-system wrote:
| Nobody is being prosecuted on the basis of blockchain
| analysis data alone -- what I mean is that the data is
| good enough that that it provides information valuable
| enough to find the criminal in meatspace with the related
| physical evidence.
|
| e.g. police look for online drug dealer with blockchain
| data, get warrant, bust down door, find big pile of
| drugs.
|
| The point being, the data might not be "proof" on its own
| but it absolutely illustrates that there is no privacy on
| public ledgers.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| depends on the wallets you use and what you do with them,
| being able to identify criminals is honestly a plus and
| if you really wanted to you could make their job *really*
| hard if you wanted to truly hide from an abusive
| government. Not being able to hide huge transactions in
| the millions / billions is honestly a good thing. Imagine
| the transparency we could get if all governments used
| crypto currencies instead of the walled garden that is
| SWIFT.
| serial_dev wrote:
| Let's say you need three transactions a week, that's 150 a
| year. How do you get the right amount of funds into these
| wallets? How will you get your money out? How will they not
| be able to track you anyway? As far as I know, you just make
| the identifiable wallets one hop away.
|
| Again, I'm assuming traditional "old school" non-privacy
| cryptocurrencies.
| gunalx wrote:
| There are tumbling services, where you for a fee can mix
| upp your transaction with lots of other users transactions
| to make it less obvious you where the one that transfered
| the credit to your burner wallet.
|
| Kepp in mind, tumblers have also been found to keep logs
| that ended upp in law enforcement.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| Well by design you receive crypto currency in different
| wallets to begin with and what funds to use, well that's
| simple - whatever wallet has enough cryptocurrency to cover
| the transaction.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The term pseudonymous should be more popular. A crypto id is a
| pseudonym, right? In the sense that it is a consistent identity
| you have, just, not one that is initially tied to the identity
| you were born with.
|
| Social media handles are usually pseudonymous at most.
|
| I wonder where the figure of anonymity is. With writing style
| analysis, correlating pseudonyms is probably pretty easy these
| days. Maybe we'll all start writing our ideas into LLMs and
| have them do the talking...
| photon_garden wrote:
| > That's not privacy. That's performance art.
|
| Smells like it was written by an LLM so I stopped reading.
| undeniablemess wrote:
| AI generated article. What a slop.
| BloondAndDoom wrote:
| I don't know what's wrong with these comments. This is the kind
| of smart design we want to see and everyone is doing nitpicking.
|
| Can we have just better things or are we going to reject
| everything that's not perfect and by doing so concede the whole
| point and just give up?
|
| Well done OP for the right approach and your business. This has
| always been my design (when possible) to approach data security.
| When you don't have data you don't have to worry about its
| security.
|
| Best of luck, ignore the naysayers.
| o999 wrote:
| @ybceo As long as you use Cloudflare to verify users
| [fingerprints] and traffic between users and your service is
| decrypted at Cloudflare side, I am afraid it difficult to take
| these anonymity claims seriously.
|
| Please do not to rely on fingerprinters or CDNs that does TLS-
| termination for you.
| snakepit wrote:
| In many ways, we're past the point of no return. So-called
| ubiquitous technical surveillance is largely the norm, often
| encroaching by design beyond the boundaries of expected decency.
|
| Informational terrorism, a dysphemism that describes the manner
| by which certain data is abused to "re-rank content" for a
| "personalized experience," is encoded into the DNA of certain
| large tech companies.
| lisbbb wrote:
| Yes. The only question left is when does the terror begin? And
| it will--it will be our own governments clamping down on all of
| us. The digital norm globally will be China under the CCP. That
| is the future for all of us unless we turn it off, but we won't
| because humans are stupid.
| pcthrowaway wrote:
| The terrorism is already occurring, it's merely exported to
| other people
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| > we're past the point of no return
|
| The _ideal_ would have been a security-first (privacy-first)
| industry and supply chain. The ideal never _was_ going to
| happen, anymore than the early _educational ideals_ of the
| television industry.
|
| Ergo we are not past the point of no return. That point never
| existed. We are right where we should expect to be, with most
| people victimised by the industry and the supply chain, and
| with a small percentage of people working in security/privacy
| education to mitigate unsafe practices.
|
| Seatbelts and airbags exist. Smoking is banned in many public
| settings. It took a senseless amount of carnage to achieve
| these measures.
|
| We just haven't achieved the requisite amount of privacy
| carnage. Yet.
| chneu wrote:
| Eh, defeatist attitude. It isn't that hard to anonymize and
| obfuscate your data.
|
| The issue is everyone is willing to trade convenience for
| security.
|
| The point of no return is an individual choice.
| hkt wrote:
| > The point of no return is an individual choice.
|
| This is largely the attitude that led to this in the first
| place. This is about failures of messaging, campaigning, and
| organising. It is a lack of democratic engagement that
| directly stems from the idea of individual choice being
| supreme over everything.
| snakepit wrote:
| This doesn't reflect the current reality. Tech companies
| acquire questionable third-party data without consent and
| exploit it however they see fit.
| made3 wrote:
| "Please unblock challenges.cloudflare.com to proceed."
|
| talk about anonymity but uses cloudflare. you threw away your tls
| and allow cloudflare to sit in the middle of the user and your
| web page. you're a hypocrite.
| uoaei wrote:
| Hypocrisy is a moral failing but also a somewhat pedantic one
| -- has this person condemned these activities or merely
| lamented them?
| vpribish wrote:
| hyperbolic.
|
| anonymity in your product could be a sensible design choice that
| your customers could value. fine. go nuts.
|
| but in general? hard disagree. anonymity is fragile and can't be
| guaranteed, privacy is a legal obligation which can actually be
| enforced if push comes to shove.
|
| also that page reads like slop : it's not X, it's Y. blah blah
| blah. this is a marketing piece trying to go viral.
| dtj1123 wrote:
| The onion link for the site appears to be broken.
| heliumtera wrote:
| Nice ad you bought! Oh wait
| vitonsky wrote:
| Yet another promotional post of Mullvad team. Nice story, but I
| don't buy it.
|
| Email is fine when it is an option. Mullvad have even option to
| pay with a credit card & PayPal. That's more sensitive data than
| Email.
| jfengel wrote:
| Like security, the Internet doesn't tolerate half measures. You
| either have perfect privacy or none.
|
| A lot of our intuitions about both are based on obscurity: nobody
| is interested enough to devote their lives to you. That's not the
| case any more. You are exposed to every person on the planet, and
| they have the tools to automate attacks on every single person.
|
| That's not to say "give up", but we need to find a new
| understanding of how our lives work. It's like we're all hunter-
| gatherers who find ourselves instantly in the largest and fastest
| city, with nobody to teach us the ropes.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Which is kinda interesting because the only people I know
| without any internet presence are very old or, working for
| intelligence services.
| necovek wrote:
| Isn't the actual difference between privacy and anonimity that
| one indicates that the company knows who you are, but ensures
| this stays "private", and the other is about not knowing who you
| are?
| WolfeReader wrote:
| Yes. Privacy and anonymity are both useful in different
| contexts. This article is just an ad for a service.
| adipid wrote:
| 100%! Privacy and anonymity isn't the same thing.
| coldstartops wrote:
| You are liying. here: https://servury.com/datacenters/
|
| Here on datacenters you say your are ISO27001 and SOC2 certified.
|
| "We're ISO 27001 certified and maintain SOC 2 Type II
| compliance."
|
| You do not have any certificate that I can find:
| https://www.iafcertsearch.org/search/certified-entities?sear...
|
| https://www.iafcertsearch.org/search/certified-entities?sear...
|
| Who is the company who certified you? What is the certification
| number?
| combyn8tor wrote:
| How do you accept crypto payments? Is there a Stripe style
| service that provides an API and/or payment portal? Id like to
| implement something for my SaaS but generally can't be bothered
| with crypto.
| canyp wrote:
| A company talking big about privacy generally comes across as
| dishonest, and you'd have to get all the details right to avoid
| unleashing the Internet's wrath. It looks like you screwed up
| between the server logs and Cloudflare. Unfortunate, but it seems
| to me that it reflects a lack of experience more than ill intent
| (I do not have such experience myself either.)
|
| Honest question, but did you add the Cloudflare proxy to solve an
| actual problem, or did you deploy it a priori without an actual
| justification?
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