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Ah, OK. I don't really find that too compelling, to be honest - what's your NAT buying you if you don't have many users to mix your traffic with? I live alone

Ah, OK. I don't really find that too compelling, to be honest - what's your NAT buying you if you don't have many users to mix your traffic with? I live alone and as far as I can see, all my NAT does for my privacy is a smidgen of plausible deniability (maybe a visitor on my guest wifi made that request), and that you can't tell which of my devices I'm using when I access a particular service - which is a small privacy win, but not a meaningful one in my book. Even for what I imagine is the common case of a family sharing one router, I'd guess it's usually not challenging to distinguish traffic between the relatively small number of potential users/devices. If you're lucky(?) enough to be behind a NAT with enough hosts to be meaningful privacy-wise (dozens? hundreds?), and whoever's running this NAT isn't keeping logs about it (do they? honestly don't know), then you might be seeing a significant privacy upside. But it's not built-in to the protocol, and just adding a NAT doesn't buy you any privacy by itself. I think the problem is that the privacy enhancing part of NAT is an emergent side-effect, not the main goal. Now it's got me thinking there should be something like NAT but explicitly targeted to privacy, like guaranteeing that your traffic is mixed through an IP that minimum a hundred other people are using. Or something like that.

bigiain 6y ago
> If you're lucky(?) enough to be behind a NAT with enough hosts to be meaningful privacy-wise (dozens? hundreds?), and whoever's running this NAT isn't keeping logs about it (do they? honestly don't know), then you might be seeing a significant privacy upside. I worked out of a co-working space for a while that were explicit about not logging anything on their NATed shared internet connection. I saw more Google captchas using that (without a VPN) that I’d even see with TOR. After I left, a friend I’d made there told me they eventually found out someone there was doing seriously blackhat seo stuff and they kicked him out. Took a few months but eventually all the captchas went away.

bigiain 6y ago

> If you're lucky(?) enough to be behind a NAT with enough hosts to be meaningful privacy-wise (dozens? hundreds?), and whoever's running this NAT isn't keeping logs about it (do they? honestly don't know), then you might be seeing a significant privacy upside. I worked out of a co-working space for a while that were explicit about not logging anything on their NATed shared internet connection. I saw more Google captchas using that (without a VPN) that I’d even see with TOR. After I left, a friend I’d made there told me they eventually found out someone there was doing seriously blackhat seo stuff and they kicked him out. Took a few months but eventually all the captchas went away.