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by swores 757 days ago
That clearly wasn't the point they were making, they were just explaining why your suggestion of "only make it show to people who search for a specific address" doesn't do anything to limit the ability of landlords to look up reviews about themselves.
1 comments
bsza 757 days ago
It does though. It eliminates the need to ever include an address in plaintext on the site, making it a lot harder for data harvesters to extract private information from it. Landlords likely won’t iterate through each and every similar site to search for reviews. At least not all of them.
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baby_souffle 757 days ago
> Landlords likely won’t iterate through each and every similar site to search for reviews. At least not all of them.

It only takes one. And if it’s been automated, you’ve just made it plain text but with extra steps.

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bsza 756 days ago
> if it’s been automated

Bcrypt has key stretching, brute-forcing every address in existence would cost a lot of CPU even for one city. How will the attacker get compensated for that?

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saagarjha 756 days ago
A landlord is just going to check their address. Why would they brute force anything?
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bsza 756 days ago
You are only assuming one kind of attack vector, which is a landlord discovering this exact site. Whereas the more impactful scenario is a web crawler discovering this site, grabbing its content and making it Googleable, so that not one but every landlord can access it. Like I already explained 4 comments ago.

I honestly don’t get why I even have to explain this. The original question was how anonymous it can get. Any practice that reduces the amount of personal information, or the ease to access it, helps, period. Dismissing one because it doesn’t offer perfect protection is like not using condoms because they are ineffective against mono. There is no reason not to implement them - that is, if the maintainer actually cares about privacy.

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ZhadruOmjar 756 days ago
If the site becomes popular e.g. "#1 Landlord Review Site" then everyone will be checking their reviews on it. If it's never popular and not used often then it doesn't matter if it's clear text or not.
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