@kitten I think when people are mindful of not divulging their IP needlessly it's to protect things like location and other fingerprinting info (like ISP, torrents you download and so on), not because they're afraid they might get hacked
@kitten@antonia that's a bold assumption. but even then, you're not thinking like a stalker. imagine an app has a bug that allows an attacker to discover your IP, at any time, without leaving a permanent notification that they did. by tracking your IP they would be able to infer patterns like when you're at home, when you're outside, at work, at a friend's house. those events may, when combined with further data about you, reveal more sensitive data
@kitten@antonia this is like when people complain about an API not being available, even if it's something seemingly innocuous like say, the battery charge level. it may seem innocuous in a vacuum, but it is one more piece of fingerprinting data that can be used to subvert your privacy when combined with others
@kitten@antonia (I'm the first one to point out everytime people exaggerate the gravity of IP discovery, but I won't claim it's unoffensive and so we shouldn't bother if we expose it needlessly)
@mildsunrise@kitten@antonia does your IP alone reveal your exact location? probably not if you live in a large city. but if you can combine it with multiple other pieces of information you might be able to get someone's exact physical location and that can put them in danger. fewer data points is always better
@kitten@antonia@mildsunrise think about e.g. university IPs (which are like pretty easy to tie to a narrower set of locations than GeoIP would otherwise provide), and similar cases where orgs have a dedicated set of IPs.
It's clear that this usually isn't as much of a problem with IPv4 (due to CGNAT, etc.), except for stuff like universities which managed to grab large amounts of IPs when they were still cheap; but it is with IPv6, as these provide a much finer granularity, and affordable.
@fogti@kitten@antonia oh yeah, I remember when I realized uni was giving me my own routable IPv4. I asked them and their response was "we have them, so why not"
@antonia@estrogen.network
