Re: [Shutup] [ietf-smtp] Proposed Charter for the "SMTP Headers Unhealthy To User Privacy" WG (fwd)

[Ted Lemon <[e-mail]>]

Wednesday, Dec 2, 2015 12:40 PM John Levine wrote:
> You can kind of tell where I am from my mail headers,
> but since my name and address and phone number are in the phone book,
> it's hard to imagine what the damage would be.

The damage is that there are quite a few John Levines in the world.   If you say something that triggers someone's desire to harass you, they will be able to use your IP address to determine that it is the John Levine who lives in Trumansburg who offended them, and then they can just google "John Levine Trumansburg" to dox or swat you.   This is _precisely_ the problem with revealing your IP address.   It took me about ten minutes to get your home address, and that's because I don't have any practice.   Without the IP address, I would have had no chance of figuring out _which_ John Levine to target with my notional swatting or pizza delivery.  It would have taken <1 minute to find your street address except that you did a good job of chaffing by using a P.O. Box.


--
Sent from Whiteout Mail - https://whiteout.io

My PGP key: https://keys.whiteout.io/[e-mail]