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Re:Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising by charcircuit on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @09:55AM (#27761148)
>your argument does not seem to be made in good faith

I'm not exactly sure what this means. I used to be all for total privacy, but I found that future to not be sustainable. Perhaps I'm just jaded, but privacy just gets in the way.

>This whole thread is about surveillance based advertising being bad.

Well this part of the thread isn't. It's talking about how surveillance improves services by allowing them to deal with abuse.

>In no way is using an IP address in a firewall a form of surveillance. It isn't. The IP address isn't being associated with any other data, it's just some numbers floating in space, disconnected from any human being.

Wrong. I am using your IP as part of a scheme to fingerprint you. I want my rate limit to limit each person separately. An IP address is just a somewhat decent way to approximate that.

>The idea of Proof of Work CAPTCHAs is that you can actually make it more expensive for an attacker to solve those than it would be for the attacker to solve Google CAPTCHAs.

This has to be carefully balanced with the user experience. No user in going to want to wait 5 minutes to post when they can just have a Google account with a good reputation and just click a checkbox.

Re:Open letter: Ban surveillance-based advertising by danbruc on Wednesday July 07, 2021 @10:10AM (#27761310)
I used to be all for total privacy, but I found that future to not be sustainable. Perhaps I'm just jaded, but privacy just gets in the way.

That's not your decision, I decide what matters to me, whether I want my privacy or this nebulous sustainability, whatever this is suppose to be.

Wrong. I am using your IP as part of a scheme to fingerprint you. I want my rate limit to limit each person separately. An IP address is just a somewhat decent way to approximate that.

Then let me turn this around, if using my IP address in this scenario is surveillance, then don't do it. If it is necessary, then ask me for permission, can we use your IP address to fight off attacks and ensure the availability of our website or do you prefer that the website might not always be available due to attacks? And the same applies if you want to rate limit all users, offer the choice between not using your website or opting in for IP based rate limiting. It's that easy.