Hello everyone! I am currently in the midst of writing my dissertation for the SAFE Wiki project and in a small section I am discussing user privacy.

SAFE Wiki... Wikipedia on the SAFE Network Apps Please see my original forum post for more context. Without a doubt in my mind, the most important website in the world is Wikipedia. The importance of having free access to educational material cannot be overstated. For many people around the world, it is a luxury that they can only dream of. In the SAFE Network I saw an opportunity to help bring this luxury to those unfortunate few. Since October of last year, I have been working away on developing my application SAFE Wiki. SAFE W…

The privacy of users is something that has been on my mind and I would like to start a discussion with you all to hear your insights and comments. As far as I understand it, user privacy is a feature of the network. Through Routing/Crust, the only nodes that ever receive your IP address are the Proxy Nodes . Deeper into the network, all vaults know is the XOR Address of the account accessing/maipulating the data. Please correct me if I am wrong.

This abstraction does provide some level of privacy to a user. However, if you manage to link an XOR Account Address with an IP address (through malware or a Proxy Node acting as a ‘bad party’ etc) then I assume anonymity of that individual starts to break down. Now obviously through the use of a VPN or similar service their ‘real’ IP address could be obfuscated, for the casual user though this wouldn’t be the case.