Bye bye privacy, hello tracking. That's right Minds wants your i.p address you know that thing that links to your computer and can tell them if you're picking your nose.
Really I'm not fucking with you Minds wants your personal i.p address and are talking about tracking users more and more, dont believe me here is a comment about it from a Minds admin.
What a sad day it is when a social media who claims to be privacy and user driven wants to start tracking its users and destroying trust.
If you're not sure of the implications and privacy taken from users by tracking I.Ps I'll briefly cover that, but as for now we are going to cover who it affects.
Unfortunately lt affects most everyone expect skilled techno users or those who can afford a nice vpn.
The main issue with tracking i.ps is that you're tracking i.ps ; meaning a way for others to track you is available. I do not care what anyone says if a way to track a user down to the users street address exits on the network the network is not privacy based and you are at risk, just ask Facebook.
I mean as a long time user and privacy focused person I'd probably end up moving away to a more privacy driven social media that wasn't interested in tracking and taking advantage of users. Once they can track your i.p they can do other things like track your data and sell it, humm seems we have been down this road, stand up or stand out you may as well just give me your address now.
Because Minds lacks management tools, yet again instead of giving users the power like a full block for groups, chats, and management tools that work they want to control the atmosphere by tracking you and your data. For any argument on this tracking an i.p is tracking data plan and simple. That's right users are asking for Minds to track and ban i.ps because of trolls, of course this will do nothing against bots or trolls expressly if they are a technology based user, let's give then the upper hand here is https://openvpn.net/private-tunnel/ ; A power VPN that you can use to connect thousands of severs and tunnel through to websites avoiding them tracking your private information. This is just one of many free open sourced products that is used for just this purpose to protect you from sites that want to exploit you via your internal i.p address like Minds is looking into as you read this blog.
Protect yourself, stand up speak out, stop data mining and companies like Minds taking advantage of its user base.
Soon after the publish of this blog we recived an update from the Minds team notifying us that Minds hashes I.P's for security and spam blocking as seen in here:
https://gitlab.com/minds/engine/blob/master/Core/Security/SpamBlocks/IPHash.php