> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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?
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> That's already a huge breach in comparison to mullvad privacy page.
And the "3 data points, that's it" of the blog post
I mean technically yes but I find THAT kind of logging utterly benign.
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.
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.
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?
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Wow good for them. I wish we took it that seriously in North America.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Maybe ironically - just going on the title because I can't read the rest as a result - it's behind a cloudflare gate.
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).
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 think they remove the invoice after a month. You can also, send them cash in an envelope
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.
Glad I had to do a Cloudflare turnstile captcha to see this page
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.
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.
"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.
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.
This was authored using an LLM, wasn't it. The style is unmistakable. Stop wasting our time with this slop.
Here's the thing. It's not just x, it's hyperbole y. Hyperbole. Y.
Yeeeep. I'm very disappointed because the subject matter is important.
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.
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.
The very premise is false, privacy does mean something, and anonymity doesn't really exists. This is an advertisement.
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.
Apparently neither does spelling. "anymore" -> "any more"
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anymore
Anymore is a word though.