Concern on privacy

[futballer]

As a user who lives in a country where privacy is at the forefront of concern, I’ve noticed that Hiveon is using tracking tech from the biggest purveyors of private data for sharing and selling to 3rd parties. I can see the use of google tag manager at minimum, but I’m certain with a network analysis I’ll find many other data sharing points. I know to marketing persons in the HiveOn.com back office it seems innocuous. but if you undestood how the data was used downstream by google and others, you would realize it is a data leak, as it is used in big data algo’s with other data to pinpoint who your miners likely are and where they are. This is concerning not because I don’t want to pay my share of taxes on whatever I make but because privacy was one of the big topics when my country fought for it’s independence. My country, before it was a country, was a colony who was subject to search, seizure and in domicile forced occupation of living quarters, it was a trigger point for a revolution.

Now it is happening again in a digital world where only those with good knowledge and understand of what is happening in the bigger picture, understand the attack that is happening around the world. PLEASE, stop using these tools just to collect cookies on your customers for marketing campaigns and to track usage, there are better and less intrusive tools for this and you should not be marketing to you customers in this manner as it exposes them. It seems innocent, but it exposes your user base downstream. There are cases where security agencies need to collect data to protect their citizens, but when the data collections begins to be abused by other groups who also have access to the data, it becomes a grave concern for all who live in a country that values individual rights.

[keaton_hiveon]

I will pass on your concerns. You are welcome to decline cookies and use a vpn or similar to better obfuscate your online presence.

If you haven’t already, please take a look at our privacy policy Hiveon|Privacy Policy

[futballer]

Thank you, my concern about using vpn is performance hit on miners, potential hit on revenue. It would be better to start with better business practices with a business model like hiveon as it is not only a passive income engine but a way for many to make some money in countries that no longer have rights or independence. Hiveon should support privacy at all levels. I think this is a case where marketing has been turned over to non-techie types who have requested these tracking codes be embedded into pages. Even if only embedded on non-dashboard pages there is still potential to cross reference data from tld to come to a determination who is mining with hiveon.

[futballer]

Outside of seeing activity on glasswire, here is screenshot of call to google services while I’m on dashboard trying to open a remote session to rig. I realize a lot of people will say, yeah but that’s google anlaytics, their just capturing cookie data, ip address and domain uri, but is this really something you want google to have for your private mining farm? Yes I can use a vpn but it will still report back the cookie data. Honestly, this is really not a good practice when their are server side analytic tools that have been around for years that can give you same basic views of traffic. Generally the only reason you collect this data is for marketing or sharing, which may be not in alignment with your privacy philosophy.

Also on cookies, yes I can do that, and hopefully still get full functionality as sometimes apps will not function correctly with cookie disabled, but again the point of this post is to question philosophy and real need as your farmers are not all from a technical background and understand what it means. And as these things are enabled by default it would seem to enforce the idea that this may not be in alignment with business philosophy, I think giving up privacy for convenience is a compromise.

All that I’d ask is to stop given our data to google by default.

[painting]

you can connect to the rigs directly using ssh

Also, there are tools that allow you to block google and other third party sites. Not sure if that would break the interface

Regardless of all that, hive tracks all your activity using your id. As long as you have a free account, you could use a obfuscated account. However, they still know your wallet addresses and what you do.

As for the vpn, i didn’t notice a hit on speed. Actually, in my case some of the connections seemed faster. Give it a try and see how t works for you. Also dns for the rig are done through https(?) so those are kept private

[futballer]

Agreed, I can do these things and Hiveon has a right to KYC, my point is the sharing of data by default, iow these tools are commonly used to collect cookie and other data ‘by default’, having done some work for an entity that is engaged in the data aggregation business I guess I may have a different view on this and some opinion on where the lines should be drawn. Marketing to my own customers is one thing but this data slips out and is collated with other data and profiling is done, that is linked to known data points like ip addresses, email addresses, names, etc. So once hiveon shares the data with a data aggregator like google or yahoo, it doesn’t stop there, the data is sold and this mining activity and interest in cryptocurrency becomes psuedo public knowledge, iow, anyone can buy it. And imho n based on reports, countries like China who want to control in depth what their citizen do, can use this same data to profile their citizen. One example, in recent history we saw China purge all bitcoin miners, now they had knowledge of large facilities, but did they purge small at home miners? I don’t know, but at some point a government could decide to do that by making it a crime to mine a cryptocurrency, so then the next step is someone comes knocking at your door. My country has already had politicians debate this and make proclamations that it should be illegal. And as the winds change so do what they are willing to do.

So long story short, sharing this data can put miners at risk in some potential cases, but it also violates some level of privacy that I believe hiveon miners believe they have, iow, not from hiveon knowledge but 3rd party knowlege.

To give another example of how this might work, when I started mining and trading, after some time I began to see that I had been profiled already, even with moderate protections in place. I received btc scam offers and legitimate offers. But now my wife residing at the same physical address now gets text messages on her phone with btc scam offers. Now is this just coincidence or is it data aggregation results? Without doing some deep time consuming analysis by someone who had access to the backend of some of these systems we will never now how the marketers profile her phone number.

And to be clear I never see hiveon ads and have no reason to believe hiveon themselves are marketing in this manner, but my point is once they share the data with google, the data is no longer within their control, so thereby not making it possible for them to fulfill a privacy promise. If the google tools are being used to measure traffic to site, then there are other independent and free tools that have no risk of data leakage that can be enabled on the web servers and made available to staff that needs to do that analysis.

My whole effort here is in hopes of getting some awareness and a change in practice so that hiveon can do what they need to do for their business without exposing their user base to abuse downstream.