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)
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.
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.
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 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.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.
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.
>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.
Exactly. Just because something is possible doesn’t mean it’s probable. Everything is a risk. Everyone needs to prioritize against the set of risks that can be identified and figure out if they can be mitigated.
This is really well-stated, and I'd add that even if you want to adopt the paranoid perspective, it still shouldn't lead someone to flatten all risks until they look the same. In real-world scenarios with real risk (military, firefighting, policing, etc.) real effort is made to measure and prioritize risks. Without that measuring and prioritizing risks the privacy crowd prevented from making real improvement.
>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.
If data exists, it can be subpoenaed by the government.
Personally, I don't understand people's mindless anathema about being profiled by ad companies, as if the worst thing ever in the world is... being served more relevant ads? In fact I love targeted ads, I often get recommended useful things that genuinely improve my life and save me hours in shopping research.
It's the government getting that data that's the problem. Because one day you might do something that pisses off someone in the government, and someone goes on a power trip and decides to ruin your life by misusing the absolute power of the state.
The private sector - banks, insurances, your e-mail provider, cloud storage provider... - can mess with you pretty well, too.
If a correlation has the data it will sell it to anyone, including the government
If a government has the data there’s a chance it will stay in the government at least
You either
1) don’t want it stored
2) are happy for government to have it but not companies
3) are happy for everyone to have it
The government would need to know what to subpoena, and what to prioritize as well. In principle could the government subpoena my ISP, learn I'd used a VPN, subpoena the VPN, learned I visited Wikipedia, then subpoena Wikipedia to finally learn what articles I'd written. Yes, but in practice this will never happen. There's no interest in doing so, and it's unclear a judge would be convinced that useful information could be obtained from such a path.
On the other hand, if I'm making death threats on Facebook, there's a much more realistic path: view the threats from a public source --> subpoena Facebook for private data.
Treating the two risks as similar is madness.
> - 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).
But it's not malicious. It's not ideal, and it should be addressed, but it's not bad faith or intentional spying or even gross negligence or incompetence.
When you claim you keep no logs yet find out you are keeping logs, what is that if not incompetence or negligence?
Human. And what was their reaction upon having this crime brought to their attention? It was exactly all anyone could ask for.
Shitting on well-intentioned people who merely failed to be perfect is not a great way to get the most of what you ultimately want.
If you think intent doesn't matter then what happens when well-intentioned people decide it's not worth trying because no matter what they will be crucified as murderers even if all they did wrong was fail to clean the break room coffee pot. The actual baddies are still there and have no inhibitions and now not even any competition.
Calling a strike a strike does not blame the batter. It’s simply calling it for what it is. Even if the person corrects the wrong does not mean that incompetence or negligence was not the correct description. This entire being offended for the correct words used to describe things is tiresome. It’s like people being offended at being told they are ignorant. Ignorant does not mean stupid. Just because ignorant people are ignorant of the word does not make people using words correctly mean or bad or full of ill will.
But jumping to pitchforks just teaches companies to ignore the privacy crowd. Why cater to them when every action is interpreted as malicious? If you can do no right then realistically you can do no wrong either. If every action is "wrong" then none are. In this way I think the privacy community just shoots themselves in the foot, impeding us from getting what we want.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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I went ahead and took action on the criticism as soon as I saw the parent comment. All apache access logs are piped to /dev/null now.
I'm not here to debate, the reason I posted here is to hear what people thought and see how I could improve my platform based on the criticism.
Look into the Apache module called mod-remove-IP, it's old and hasn't had any changes for years, but it works much better than just disabling in the logs because it will also persist those removals throughout any frameworks. Also with Apache you cannot as easily destroy your error logs which sometimes have IPS in them. Consider nginx as an alternative
Consider Caddy as an alternative. Nginx is no better. Both Apache httpd and nginx are old and don’t support newer protocols like HTTP/3. Maybe I’m wrong.
Another issue is with Apache httpd’s routing. Removing the IP messes up routing sometimes when using mod_rewrite.
Sure they do:
https://nginx.org/en/docs/quic.html
https://apisix.apache.org/docs/apisix/http3/
well damn... old dog new tricks. Maybe it's my distro that's old.
I appreciate your opinion on anonymity, but, it's nothing more than, "trust me bro". And being a US company that further tingles the spidy sense.
The US isn't the sole transgressor against privacy. EU has made that pretty clear in the last month.
What happened in the last month? Genuine question
Look up Chat Control.
Chat Control was first proposed in 2022 and is still in parliament. Some try to push it through again and again but it gets blocked. I don’t see why it should be different this time and so far nothing has actually changed for EU citizens.
Privacy was a joke--every time I gave someone my data that data got breached, including the US government.
Just curious, why not accept cash?
Not that I use it, but one of the best privacy features of Mullvad is that you can post them cash with your account number and they will credit it. That makes the transaction virtually, and for all practical purposes, untraceable.
It seems like you have the means to do exactly that too.
The whole thing is behind cloudflare!
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.
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.
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
Who gets ddosed on the regular? Spam is a regular problem, but I have never encountered a ddos on a business website.
Yes. The whole "you will be ddosd if you are exposed to the world wide web" is fud. (And/or racketeering)
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.
>I've had webservers
But have those webservers supported a small or medium-sized business?
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.
Mine did. Mine do. Never a problem. Not once.
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.
Does it matter, when CF is collecting all that already before people even reach your site?
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.
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.
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)
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.
I think you mean if a court asks for it. And they have to ask for something you actually have
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.
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...
Which privacy-oriented companies do you prefer?
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.
What is truly absurd is that most websites default to logging activities. It's as if they actively conspired against their users.
> That's already a huge breach in comparison to mullvad privacy page.
And the "3 data points, that's it" of the blog post
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.
IPs are PII. They can be tied to an identity.
Even user agents are often specific enough to be considered PII.
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.
I mean technically yes but I find THAT kind of logging utterly benign.
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
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
Indeed, the whole thing reads like it was written by an LLM.
Do as I say, not as I do! /s