Centroid.EU Blog

Anonymity

December 3rd, 2015

In this article from heise online (german), politicians cry out about anonymity. In this case they're right IMO. However I see the problem different. Right now the "end-user" is given a dynamic IP address which is to "guarantee" them their anonymity. Yet the provider knows who they are, and google as well as other large networks who can correlate big data or logins to match someone. Also an end-user today must use IMAP or POP3 or webmail to a server on the internet to fetch their mail. Pretend it were different. Pretend everyone was given a static IP. Everyone now theoretically knows who this person is. Google would not care because they already knew anyhow, but you may see its market share go down because they don't guard a secret anymore. Also people would be able to get their mail via SMTP instead of IMAP/POP3 meaning mail is not stored on a 3rd party server. This is positive. A person with a static IP can run any services they like and become a server in this sense. This means that someone can have friends using their computer too, but if any of those friends betray the trust and invite a police visit, the friendship may be endangered. Who has taken the blame for things their friends did? I for one did once. But that was the last time. If you're a known troll for something your friends did from your computer it'd be very hard to repair that reputation, but that's the idea behind fixing this anonymity. So let's all be open and have static IP's is my idea.

---