alt Hacker NewsPrivacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does
Comments
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)
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.
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?
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
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.
Maybe ironically - just going on the title because I can't read the rest as a result - it's behind a cloudflare gate.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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).
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? JÁ!
Glad I had to do a Cloudflare turnstile captcha to see this page
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
> Privacy is Marketing. Anonymity is Architecture.
But in order to read the article you need to enable JS. What a joke.
This was authored using an LLM, wasn't it. The style is unmistakable. Stop wasting our time with this slop.
Is this a joke?
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.
[dead]
Apparently neither does spelling. "anymore" -> "any more"
The very premise is false, privacy does mean something, and anonymity doesn't really exists. This is an advertisement.
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)