Ethereum Dev confirms that user data is difficult to protect

According to a major Ethereum developer, Peter Szilagyi, who is also overseeing the development of the Ethereum Geth software client, people are unaware of how much of their information is available in the open.

What Szilagyi refers to here is the fact that little attention is focused on the underlying network layer of Ethereum, where information is exposed in complex and unpredictable ways.

Of course, it is well known that there is an awareness of this exposure that has given rise to a continuous acceleration in research on how to obscure user data at the application level, which overlap with a completely transparent system that publishes contracts and transactions. intelligent data at the blockchain itself.

In a recent interview, Szilagyi defined the peer-to-peer components that are under the second blockchain by market capitalization as a sort of black magic.

The current state of affairs was raised during his speech at the annual developer conference, Devcon4, in Prague, last week, when Szilagyi explained some of his concerns that could cause loss of user metadata over time. The worst case scenario is that it provides a basis for an accurate global map of all the locations of all users on Ethereum.

During the speech, Szilagyi examined two ways in which this could happen, with a focus on a website like the famous blockchain explorer, Etherscan and light clients such as applications based on mobile browsers.

Talking about CoinDesk Szilagyi said:

"When people are moving from complete nodes, they are giving up certain guarantees and I just want to highlight what potential problems might arise."

After encountering problems, Szilagyi followed his search for a parallel project that is an alternative to Facebook, which is decentralized and private by default. As a result of the research, Szilagyi said that metadata losses make it more difficult to interact with others in private.

Szilagyi said that:

"We do not have it in Ethereum, which is why this news started to bother me because of that project."

Last week, Szilagyi said that many of the problems were solved in depth, so that it is difficult to deal with them without running the risk of breaking the applications at the top of Ethereum.

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