Does cloud providers share the IP addresses and the alloted users to these big corps and defect the whole purpose of a privacy frontend? Are there any service (FOSS) that could randomise my servers IP?
Might be a noob question but I want to start self hosting.
Depends what it does.
Lets say you run a Reddit/Twitter/YouTube proxy. Yeah, the services ultimately still get your server’s IP, but you will just appear as coming from some datacenter somewhere, so while they can know it’s your traffic, they can’t track you on the client side frontend and see that you were at home (and where your home is), then you went on mobile data and then ended on a guest WiFi, then at some corporate place. The server is obfuscating all of that. And you control the server, so your server isn’t tracking anything.
The key to those services being more private is actually to have more people using them. Lets say now you have 10 people using your Invidious instance. It’ll fudge your watch pattern a fair bit, but also any watched video could be from any of the 10 users. If they don’t detect that, they’ve made a completely bogus profile that’s the combination of you and your 10 users.
You can always add an extra layer and make it go through a VPN or Tor, but if you care that much you should already always be on a VPN anyway. But it does have the convenience that you can use it privately even without a VPN.
A concrete example. I run my own Lemmy server. It’s extremely public but yet, I find it more private that Reddit would. By having my own server, all of my client-side actions are between me and my server. Reddit on the other hand can absolutely log and see every interaction I have with their site, especially now that they’ve killed third-party apps. It knows every thread I open, it can track a lot of my attention. It knows if I’m skimming through comments or actually reading, everything. In contract, the fediverse doesn’t know what I actually read: my server collects everything regardless. On the other hand, all my data including votes is totally public, so I gain privacy in a way but lose some the other way.
Privacy is a tradeoff. Sometimes you’re willing to give away some information to protect other.
For selfhosting as a whole, sure some things are just frontends and don’t give you much like an Invidious instance, but others can be really good. NextCloud for example, I know my files are entirely in my control and get a similar experience to using Google Drive: I can browse my stuff from anywhere and access my files. I have my own email, so nobody can look at my emails and give me ads based on what newsletter I get.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, if it’s an improvement and gets you into selfhosting more stuff down the line, it’s worth it.
Thanks for the long reply. I will start out my self hosting journey with some simple applications like silver bullet or something. Then after gaining more info, will try to host something for the public
[Please give some suggestions for simple selfhostable applications]
Seems like a decent start! My recommendation is pick something you’ll actually use, so you actually want to keep that VPS going, if for you that’s silver bullet then have fun!
NextCloud is relatively easy to get going and useful for sharing files. I find it convenient combined with KeePass/KeePassDX so my passwords are synchronized are nice and safe although I’m considering an upgrade to BitWarden.
Matrix is also reasonably easy to set up and you can set up bridges to just about anything.
I also have my own emails but that’s a special kind of hell for beginning with loads of things entirely out of your control.
What do you think “big corps” are doing with your IP address?
Yes, yes they will. If you’re the sole user, they’d identify you from your behaviour anyways.
I don’t think internet proxy won’t help very much w.r.t. privacy but it will make you a lot more susceptible to being blocked.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters IP Internet Protocol VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 12 acronyms.
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To add to the question, what about using a selfhosted privacy frontend behind a VPN. Does this shrink the need for a crowd.
You mean hit my selfhosted fronted from multiple IPs? I could do that, but after analysing my usage pattern they could fingerprint me.
Like hosting it from a local server that routes all internet traffic through the VPN to avoid exposing the source of the server’s IP to the unprivate service.
Yes. It makes it much harder to build a profile about you though, because you’re not logged in and they don’t know if those views come from you or someone else using your server. Even if you’re the only one, the website doesn’t know that.
The original service won’t know if it’s you accessing them through the server IP or not. What you could do is add your service to the public instance list and generate organic traffic by virtue of it being used by others.
This is an “x-y question” - what are you actually trying to achieve?
Clearly you are concerned about… someone… knowing your home IP address - who, and why?
The aim of private frontends are to limit the data being sent to their actual counterparts (eg Redlib for redddit or piped for y.t). This includes mapping usage patterns to respective IP addresses. If I am the sole user of a self hosted service, then cloud providers and big corps could easily do that.
True, but… First, they get way less data because most JavaScript was cleared out and that cuts tracking by 95% (just to put some figure). Secondly, the idea with those frontend is to have some control (e.g. recommendation algorithm is cleared, or you get to access content without an account, etc.) so, overall there are advantages. Of course, it’s a compromise situation.
