Tool privacy (block explorer, faucet, etc.)

[unk]

just as a matter of interest, are the managers of various popular bitcoin websites willing to disclose their policies and practices on retaining logs related to bitcoin addresses? i recognise that statements from such people would be hard to confirm, but most of them appear honourable.

for example, theymos, how long do you retain the httpd logs for the block explorer, thus letting you tie bitcoin addresses to ip addresses (or to each other, depending on the queries you receive)?

gavin, do you keep records of which google accounts and ip addresses are tied to bitcoin addresses that receive payments from the faucet, or only that payments were made in response to requests that were received from particular accounts and ip addresses? (i know you need to do the latter to prevent abuse.)

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[theymos]

Currently I am keeping logs forever. I have logs since BBE was first started (and before). Make sure you use Tor while accessing BBE if you need anonymity.

[joan]

Block explorer is a query tool, I don't think the logs would help link an IP address with a Bitcoin address.
The concern can be with the exchanges sites and the merchants.

[unk]

of course they'd provide a potential link. for example, if only one ip address (or a small number of them) has ever queried a bitcoin address that seems not to have been released into the public, anyone with the logs can have a pretty good idea in most cases that the network interface that made the query is at least associated with the owner of the bitcoin address. many other sorts of patterns would be evident from the logs.

update: i'm not trying to imply that i object to theymos's decision to keep the logs. i'm not personally affected in any way; i was just curious and thought others might be interested. thanks for the information, theymos.

[theymos]

IP addresses and user agents are now disassociated from each other and from the rest of the log data in Bitcoin Block Explorer's logs after 30 days. This prevents someone with access to my logs from seeing which pages an IP address visited (after 30 days).

This has also been done retroactively to old logs.