[geofft]

Honestly, I think if the GDPR had been around before HTTP, we would have seen HTTP as the unreasonable part in this system.

You don't have to make a direct TCP/IP connection for two people to communicate. We had systems like Usenet and UUCP that replicated data through a series of servers. Even today, when you use email, you talk to your email provider who talks to the recipient's email provider, and they have no need to share your personal IP addresses in the process. Some providers used to include this in Received: headers, but many today do not, rightly seeing it as a privacy concern. And even on HTTP we had (and still have, in some cases) mirrors, where legally-unrelated entities host copies of each others' data. Someone in the EU can visit http://ftp.icm.edu.pl/pub/linux/Documentation/ and never have their connection known to the US-juridiction host of TLDP.

It is both socially sensible for these providers to consent to sharing their own infrastructure IP addresses with other providers (but not share their customers' IP addresses) and legally practical for them to make that consent under the GDPR.

Why should it be the case that when you visit my personal website, which I happen to self-host, I have access to your IP address? I don't want that information. I don't even get that information when using higher-level services like Hacker News or Twitter or GitHub, even though those services operate over HTTP. It's weird that I get it, honestly.

I understand there's a huge planetary investment in HTTP, and so the collision of abstractly-reasonable privacy rights with that reality is an extremely hard engineering and policy problem. But that doesn't make the privacy rights unreasonable.

[rootusrootus]

> Why should it be the case that when you visit my personal website, which I happen to self-host, I have access to your IP address?

So when you misbehave, I have the means to block you in particular.

[geofft]

My personal website is a publicly-accessible static site. Blocking people from it is not meaningful.

It might be meaningful under the model of direct HTTP, where you could be DoSing me or trying to exploit my web server. But if you don't contact me over HTTP, then that problem doesn't arise. There's no meaningful concept of blocking people from a Usenet post I write. Even for indirect HTTP, I don't need to block people from my GitHub Pages or from my HN comments. They're public.

If I add dynamic feature like a comment system or discussion forum to my website, then it becomes meaningful, but also at that point I can implement a way for you to consent to sharing your IP address with me as part of signing up.

[j16sdiz]

Now you have mentioned mail providers.

It is illegal to have source ip address in EU based smtp relay?