Privacy Doesn't Mean Anything Anymore, Anonymity Does

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,

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.

Web server logs were not tied to user credentials in any way.

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

(Asking because I really don't know)

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.