[bsza]

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.

[baby_souffle]

> 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.

[bsza]

> 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?

[saagarjha]

A landlord is just going to check their address. Why would they brute force anything?

[bsza]

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.

[ZhadruOmjar]

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.

[bsza]

Yes it does. Being a small business does not entitle you to share the addresses where your customers live with everyone.