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Comment by WallyFunk | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand the premise of Twitter having an .onion hidden service. They're anti-anonymity, at least from my experience, where they extorted my phone number from me so I could continue to use their service. Mixing PII with Tor defeats the purpose of anonymity. You're immediately outed by providing a phone number or even en e-mail.

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This goes for every single website on clearnet though?

If not phone number, they have your IP and location, timezone, likely waking hours, private chats, search queries, who you communicate with and when etc. If not collected by the webmaster then it is automatically collected by whatever government the server sits in (+ whatever governments that government trades data with).

The times of anonymity on the internet/clearnet are long gone.

> If not collected by the webmaster then it is automatically collected by whatever government the server sits in (+ whatever governments that government trades data with).

It certainly is not, that's what we did all that HTTPS perfect forward secrecy for.

Accessing Twitter from countries that don't have any way to force Twitter to divulge information is the purpose.

It's not too hard to get a temporary voip phone number if required to sign up for a service, but when I signed up this wasn't needed. Just don't use your phone. You can also get dummy, private, or temporary email addresses. Yeah, the scraping makes things harder, but it's perfectly doable to get these services completely anonymously. I mean hell, NYT, WP, CNN, Reuters, etc all have Signal and most have Secure drop, which is via Tor, to connect to them. Interestingly it looks like Fox is the only major platform not have any method I could find from a single search.

Nonsense. The threat model that onion routing protects against is a middle man intercepting the traffic, not from Twitter knowing who you are. It still offers value.

I think it’s intended to circumvent government blocks in times of unrest to ensure communication

Just a heads-up, it looks like your account might have been shadowbanned? You last few comments were all dead, as well as this one when I first saw it. Looks like someone else may have already vouched for it though.

I'm sure he's well aware, just look at his history, there's tons of people who have told him since July 23, 2022.

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