I've you've been on X in the last few days you must have seen that nikitabier's new feature is now geodoxxing X's users. By clicking on the join date in a user's profile, others can see from which country a user joined. According to X's on rational, this feature is being added to minimize nation state psyops.

But privacy advocates in the crypto space have called this "geodoxxing. Here's what Banteg from Yearn had to say:

The mitigation capability of X users here is suboptimal. While you can limit your exposure to X only showing your continent/region, this still is directionally bad for privacy and anonymity proponents.

We've hence tried to understand what we can do to X users who are negatively affected by this change.

The Ethereum Foundation and others have recently been pushing more in the direction of privacy, and so at Kiwi News we wanted to do our part.

A quick disclaimer upfront though: For an opting-in user, we are still pretty much tracking behavioural data to improve and to justify building our product.

However, we have now added an Anon Mode that disables almost all tracking and minimizes the personal data that gets sent to third parties. Additionally, it gives users true anonymity to submit, comment and upvote for free. It's basically an "enable 4chan style identity" button.

1. Open an incognito window on your browser.

2. Go to https://news.kiwistand.com?anon (do this only in incognito modus to not mess up your active session)

3. You're in! We've just created a privacy-friendly session in your browser.

Effectively what this does on a technical level is:

• It creates a new Ethereum address per interaction (upvotes, submissions. emoji reactions, comments)

• Removes Posthog and Google Analyticts tracking

• Removes internal Kiwi News tracking behavior

• Removes all third-party hosted preview images

An alternative way to log into Anon Mode, when you're anyways not logged into Kiwi News, works as follows:

1 Go to the regular Kiwi News website (works on mobile too)

2 Click on "Log In"

3 Click on Anon Mode

You can now use the site by commenting, reacting, submitting and upvoting!

If you've navigated to Anon Mode but you also had a valid Kiwi News login, then when clicking "Log out" you'll also lose your prior clear name session. In this case just Log In again by connecting your wallet and clicking through the delegation dialog. Or stay in Anon Mode :)

Mostly because we can!

Consumer apps tend to extensively track users simply because tracking can justify raising another round or for behavioural analysis. To be clear, we're also still quite extensively tracking our users on normal mode. That is not because we hate privacy, but because these resulting numbers are fundamental to the decision of whether we should keep working on the product or not.

It is a fundamental reality that only 10% of users actually engage with content on social sites. Hence if we didn't at least track users over many days, we wouldn't know at all how many users there are, or we'd come to the conclusion that we're only serving tens, not thousands of users.

In any event, we also think that true privacy should be possible when interacting with social networks. That is because it gives users the option to speak their mind freely and without fear of future repression.

Please send them to us!! We've love to be inspired by what you want us to build!

Also: If you still feel like your privacy is being compromised through something we're doing on the site, please send us a message or post to complain on the site. We will try to fix this as we really do want to have a completely tracking free and private version of Kiwi News available.

While other social networks like X are adding more features to geodox users, Kiwi News has now added "Anon mode," a way to browse a social network while trying to minimize the information you leak by interacting with the site.

And now, go try Anon Mode, anon!