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Posted by ybceo 3 days ago

Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does(servury.com)
451 points | 290 commentspage 3
____mr____ 3 days ago|
> Stripe customer ID and payment method ID Wouldnt this information allow for the authorities to just go to Stripe and ask the relevant information there? Sure, you don't store exact personally identifying info, but you store a breadcrumb that can lead whoever has the power to request that information to trace back to the end user
g947o 3 days ago|
> And for those who need traditional payments? We support Stripe. Because pragmatism matters. But we don't pretend that credit card payments are anonymous. We're honest about the trade-offs.

I think this paragraph is clear enough about that?

gruez 3 days ago||
>Here's how the average "privacy-focused" service actually works:

> ...

>5. Confirm identity for "fraud prevention" (now we have your ID)

I can't tell whether OP is being hyperbolic but it's certainly not representative of the average "privacy-focused" service I've came across. The typical service only asks for an email and maybe billing information (can be prepaid card or crypto). The only exception is protonmail, which might require SMS verification[1], but given the problem of email spam I'm sympathetic, and it's bypassble by paying. It's certainly not the "average" service, and no service asked to "Confirm identity".

[1] https://proton.me/support/human-verification

zie 3 days ago|
A phone number IS identity these days.
Johnny555 2 days ago|||
Yeah, so many places ask for phone number that don't really need it that I assume the phone number is a unique identifier used to combine individual's data across websites.

Most of the time I use a made-up 555 number or if it needs to send an SMS to verify, I'll use a free SMS numbers.

drnick1 2 days ago|||
Not if you buy a SIM or eSIM anonymously. This is easy in the U.S. with cash in a store, or online (silent.link).
qwertyuiop12 3 days ago||
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!

basket_horse 3 days ago||
The problem with this in our current society is that staying anonymous becomes your whole identity. I have a friend who for the longest time didn’t use Venmo, Uber, etc. because of privacy reasons, but the lifestyle was just not sustainable. Ultimately convenience killed privacy.
duskdozer 3 days ago||
I guess those are just examples and there are much more significant things, because Venmo and Uber seem far from indispensable.

>Ultimately convenience killed privacy.

By design, unfortunately.

stvltvs 3 days ago||
We have to choose where anonymity is worth the tradeoffs, but it's still quite possible to live without Venmo, Uber, etc.
hiAndrewQuinn 3 days ago||
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.

metalman 3 days ago||
"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.

eleveriven 3 days ago||
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
DerSaidin 3 days ago||
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).
pogue 3 days ago||
Glad I had to do a Cloudflare turnstile captcha to see this page
titzer 3 days ago|
> If you use our servers for illegal activity, law enforcement can still investigate. They just can't start with "who owns this account" because we can't answer that question.

You're going to have a tussle with law enforcement, and you're going to lose. Your service will last < 2 years because you will not be able to afford the lawyers you need to defend against even one muscle move by the government.

Good luck!

kyrofa 3 days ago||
Why? That's kind of the whole point of this: they can cooperate entirely and give them everything they have. You think they'll get into legal trouble because they aren't gathering data?
ls612 3 days ago||
You ever heard of the phrase “show me the man and I’ll show you the crime”? These guys are gonna discover what that means really quickly.
kyrofa 3 days ago||
There are a number of companies/products that operate under this principle (mullvad and signal come to mind). Are you saying all of those are futile and misleading? Or are you saying that you expect they all have significant money and legal teams to defend against a crooked cop's thirst for vengeance for not responding the way they wanted during an investigation?
ls612 3 days ago||
I’m saying it’s only a matter of time before they get Pavel Durov’ed.
svnt 3 days ago|||
No, this is a brilliantly original way to prevent legal action that has never been previously conceived of in the history of the internet.
stodor89 3 days ago||
Good old "we can't decrypt your laptop but we can repeatedly smash your head into the table until you start cooperating"
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