if I have communications with someone through the internet with a homeserver. I would inevitably give out my IP address. Is that a bad thing? In my country they don’t have services like that, RTCing would be a bit sluggish using available euro servers.

  • Jama
    7·
    3 years ago

    It depends on your threat model, as always. Since your IP is linked to you, police and everyone else who can legally ask your provider something will know who you really are. This can be a non-issue in some country and for some use-cases, and could be really dangerous for someone else. But except for this it should not impact deeply your privacy, AFAIK, and having communications under your only complete control is always a good thing. I would only be careful to not link too much services to my only person, especially “social media”.

    Still, I would advice against hosting your email server for your primary mail, since it will probably cause too many problems (antispam and the like) with other big providers

    • ierOP
      2·
      3 years ago

      I’m not trying to be anonymous or anything, I just hate not being in control of my own privacy from things snooping everything I do. e.g. using a windows computer, using whatsapp, google. etc. for communications.

      Although one worry I have is my home address being public information.

        • ierOP
          2·
          3 years ago

          I’ve already quit trying to be invisible, I thought doing so would make my life easier but the opposite happened. I kept trying to find ways that are almost impossible to do. Things I want to do by nature is publicly involved.

          So the IP just reveals general area of location, correct? Is there anything I want to worry about in my case?

            • Fisch
              3·
              3 years ago

              And .de domains don’t show that information publicy but you still need to provide it, in case you’re doing something illegal and the police needs to know who you are

              • ierOP
                1·
                3 years ago

                Thanks for the tip. Next time please tag me so I don’t miss the message.

        • GenkiFeral
          1·
          3 years ago

          I think LibreWolf browser helped me spoof my address. When i signed into Google, i go a gmail from Google saying that an unknown person was using my account in a city across the country and using Windows 10. At the time, I hadn’t been using Windows at all and had never even tried Windows 10. Can’t you get a friend to help you test it out? Ask them to turn on screen recorder and then open up an email from you or a message - then you can see what he/she sees. Then, that person sends you the video. there is also a live way to do that, but I forget what it is called - screen share or something. I think Zoom can do that and a few other software can. I’m not tech-savvy, so not sure if that’d work. Maybe someone here can correct me or add to my idea to make it work better.

        • DPUGT2
          1·
          3 years ago

          I’ve been wondering about this on-and-off for years.

          What if I didn’t give a shit? Like, maybe 1% of my gmail emails are complete garbage. Of those 1%, absolutely all of them are responses to account signups or online ordering off of big websites. For those, I could continue to use my gmail account.

          But, at this point, email’s almost worthless for real communication. If I wanted it to be for real communication, why could I not set up my own email server that is configured such that it blocks all non-encrypted emails received? Just bounces them outright. This means that it instantly becomes a zero-spammable service for me. And the dozen or so friends/family I might want to receive emails from can just get accounts on it.

          I understand (and want) it to be isolated from the greater email system. Is this possible?

          And if others wanted to (for shits and giggles? dunno) become part of it, it’d be as simple for them to set up similarly configured email servers. You could even test them automatically that they were following the rules… send an unencrypted email to it, and if it doesn’t bounce just blacklist them.

          I guess there’d have to be some sort of public key infrastructure for it, no idea how to do that.

            • DPUGT2
              2·
              3 years ago

              My work email has been automated notices about things that aren’t usually my responsibility, mixed in with online-meeting invitations and HR pseudo-spam for at least 3 years.

              Strangely, my phone became the same over about the same time period. I don’t know that I’ve had a legitimate phone call in as many years… if anything’s even close, it’s some person with a wrong number (fewer and fewer of those though, too).

              There’s some grander sociology mechanism at work here, but I haven’t quite managed to figure it out myself. Are all communications networks bound to the same fate eventually?

        • Fisch
          1·
          3 years ago

          So the only issue is that you can’t send emails to people using those providers?

            • Evan
              1·
              3 years ago

              This and also you end up leaking your IP

                • Fisch
                  1·
                  3 years ago

                  If you have a dynamic IP is your IP leaking even a problem?

    • ierOP
      1·
      3 years ago

      You need two static email addresses?

      Edit: At this point I’ll have another service provider to have my own email.

    • testingthis
      1·
      3 years ago

      It’s not impossible – if everyone starts doing it, then most public and common email servers cannot block them.

    • N0b3d
      1·
      3 years ago

      That’s just not true. It is, some might say, ridiculously hard to do because these days there are so many i’s to dot and t’s to cross, but it’s not impossible. A friend hosts his domains’ email at home.