Hello,
Since your Lemmy posts, comments, related activities, and your basic profile information will be stored in the databases across the fediverse, possibly never to be deleted (or kept by somebody who can), do you:
- Always use Tor/VPN with a fediverse app?
- Recommend others do the same?
If you feel that it is unnecessary, why do you feel that way? If you think it is necessary, why so?
Thanks. I am trying to get a feel of what I should do. For example, if my instance loses its data (due to a hack, sale, vulnerability, etc.), I am pretty sure all the information is lost (including my IP addresses). If other instances lose their data, or keep the data for their own purposes, then my posts/comments/related activities are lost (maybe excluding some of my profile information, my settings, and my IP addresses).
I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
No because I didn’t choose this public forum for its privacy or security
I just don’t care?
I know that stuff is public when I used it.
I’ve known this is how the internet works since the 90’s. I’ve also known that my IP address isn’t a scary super identifying thing as the movies would make you believe. For most people, it’s gonna point to your ISP and not your personal device.
Shit man, back in the day we used to scare noobs by showing them their own IP because it was incredibly easy to obtain. It still is, most of the time. Because it doesn’t mean fuck all.
As for everything else: If you don’t want certain pieces of information out in the wild… Don’t put them there in the first place. It’s that simple.
That would be pretty wasteful on the Tor bandwidth, unless it is necessary for you to hide your Lemmy activity from the glowies. Realistically all you would need would be a VPN, but I do not think our IPs are publicly accessible on Lemmy, and only visible to the instance admins, so another not so worrisome worry. All in all, just limit what you share and how much of it you share and you will be good.
Currently I do use a VPN, though it’s not because of Lemmy that I do so, it’s the general threat model that I made which causes me to use a VPN. I do not recommend it to others which have no use for a VPN, specially if they have not made a threat model yet.
Remember, OPsec is what kills privacy and creates linkability, something which you do not.
I’m always using a vpn for the sake of living in China, not particularly fediverse related. I simply don’t share anything I’m not comfortable everybody knowing regardless, just like we were told in the early days of the internet.
What data does Lemmy store that isn’t already inherently public. Private DMs and IPs are all I can think of, and neither of those are of any value as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t see that much of a point in this unless you’re in “they’re coming to get me” stages of paranoia.
Are there any onion service lemmy instances yet?
Also, isn’t onion service pretty much used to hide the server’s IP, but doesn’t do much about hiding anything for the end users?
The end user’s ip is hidden in the onion network. The server will get the ip address of the “last node” your client routed it’s request through (and that node only has the ip address of the previous node, etc).
However, the clients ip can be leaked if a server creates some Javascript which makes an Ajax call (basically, an additional http request). A malicious Ajax call will not go through the onion network and thus expose the clients real ip. Hence, it’s recommended to disable Javascript and other features while using tor.
If you have all your traffic going through tor, ajax requests will come from an exit node too.
I did a bit more homework and you’re right.
“Back in the day” running Javascript increased your attack area. But now-a-days I guess it’s consider “safe”.
I did find this old (7 years ago) posting which talked about concerns. Today, I guess the rule of thumb is to avoid (or limit) browser plugins.
Thank you clarify that.
