The Ethereum software company ConsenSys amended its privacy statement on Wednesday. It was suggested that the well-known cryptocurrency wallet Metamask would gather particular data. The crypto community, which values anonymity, was quite enraged by the modification.
On November 23, ConsenSys amended its privacy statement. Consensys.net, metamask.io, infura.io, consensys.net/quorum, diligence.consensys.net, and codefi.consensys.net are just a few of the websites the company “collects, utilises, distributes, and preserves personal information of users of our websites,” according to the study.
Information gathered by Infura is presented in one portion of the article. But you might wonder: Who is Infura? Infura is, to put it simply, Metamask’s default provider for remote procedure calls. The following is what the business has said:
When you utilise Infura as an RPC provider, it will record your IP address and Ethereum wallet address.
Applications that connect to the Ethereum network are created using a suite of tools called Infura. ConsenSys own both Infura and MetaMask.
RPCs allow for the remote execution of programmes and communication with servers. Users can communicate with a blockchain and acquire access to a server node on a specific network via RPCs.
You may, however, employ a technique to stop these two products from obtaining data. However, it is also possible to do so in private.
Here, the ConsenSys declares that “neither Infura nor Metamask will collect your IP address when you utilise the Ethereum node or third-party provider with Metamask.”
Consumers should be informed that any information collecting done by the third-party RPC provider they are using will be subject to their data, according to ConsenSys’ advice.
The community is not at all thrilled with ConsenSys’ publication of its privacy decoding technology. Since the recent FTX disaster caused irreversible damage to the business, the trust system has been further damaged. Several firms have now openly acknowledged that they are collecting user data.
User-provided data, such as identifying information (name, username, gender, date of birth, etc.), profile information (including username and password), contact, financial, and transaction information, among other things, are among the data the company collects through the websites mentioned above.
In addition, data is automatically collected, including log data, information from different third-party sources, and data about the pages and services that users have accessed on ConsenSys websites.
The company noted that a Data Protection Officer has been appointed, and it is their job to ensure that the company complies with its “responsibilities under relevant data protection legislation.”
It is possible to fix this.
Can it indeed be solved? Of course, it can be fixed, as the Metamask senior said (a popular crypto wallet). When author Colin Wu revealed the amended policy on Twitter and criticisms started to flood in, MetaMask co-founder Dan Finlay weighed in to stress that the user’s IP addresses aren’t actually being used for anything.
As he wrote,
“I think we can address this problem soon. We do not utilise IP addresses, even if they are temporarily kept, which we shouldn’t be, as we aren’t using them for anything.