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.
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.
What do you think “big corps” are doing with your IP address?
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.
