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Comment by gcbw2 | Hacker News Reader

This is still logging everything the GDPR says you can't without asking for consent, but you made your search convoluted (but not less efficient if you have all the pieces) to (suggest|lie?) that you need to break the hash and that's why you don't need consent.

None of the information you are using on the hash wouldn't be in the search query itself! ip, user agent, path, date, etc. So there is no way to reverse the hash. You just hash your search query and compare in O(1) time.

The only piece of information that realistically makes the hash slightly difficult to get is the random number refreshed every day. But either you store it (and i have no reason to believe you do not) or it make the brute force effort trivial as I only need to generate the hash with that variable now.

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You're focused mostly on Recital 26, which was only a theory of mine, outside of that we are GDPR compliant anyway. I likely shouldn't have included it since that isn't our primary ground for processing. Please see: https://usefathom.com/data/

And yes the daily hash gets stored until midnight. But what are you talking about with 'search query' containing IP, user agent etc.?

If a search query on your data would contain all the components of the original hash, i don't have to walk backwards and break the hash. i just have to hash my query terms in the same way.

Also I suggested you store the daily hash forever. But even if you really erase it every day, as you say, If you or an attacker makes the same request every day at a predetermined time, when you/they get your logs, you/they can use that predictable request to get the daily secret too.

I consider the information to be stored in plain text, and that you would have to have requested permission just the same. You pretty much have an identifiable user (via IP/UA/access time) stored in your logs.

Anonymization is removal of information, not encoding it in a convoluted hash.

So that needs to be our next target point (access logs). We want to move to a position to keep no access lgos.

And a hacker could indeed "win" if they broke into our system, got the salt and exported the DB. We didn't focus on this in our article, as it's unbelievably unrealistic, but it's still possible. Our next step is to address that.

Without the hash, it's practically impossible to brute force.

Not talking about a hacker. I am stating that the described hash dance offers no exclusion from GDPR as saying "we promise we won't look" would do.

My point about brute forcing being useless, is that you hold all the information needed to re-create the hash. All but one tiny piece that is the random number. so brute force is a very effective O(<tiny piece size>). And since it is stored in your locally available data, there is no rate constraints.

> I am stating that the described hash dance offers no exclusion from GDPR as saying "we promise we won't look" would do.

Under your logic, you would never trust us because we could just add $log->write(UserIp, UserAgent, Hostname, Path) in plain text. Trust is very important and what you do with the data is important under GDPR.

And we don't hold all the information to re-create the hash, that's the thing.

I thought a lot about "Oh but you could just do this, this and this" but, no, that argument doesn't hold. Our obligation under GDPR is what we actually do with data.

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