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.
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.
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.
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.
> - 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.