Copies of the data associated with that CID can be stored in any number of locations worldwide on any number of participating IPFS nodes. # Content identifiersīecause IPFS uses content addressing rather than the legacy web's method of location addressing, each piece of data stored in the IPFS network gets its own unique content identifier (CID). For purposes of understanding IPFS privacy, this may be easiest to think about in two halves: content identifiers (CIDs) and IPFS nodes themselves. # What's public on IPFSĪll traffic on IPFS is public, including the contents of files themselves, unless they're encrypted. If you're worried about the implications of this for your personal use case, it's worth taking additional measures. While IPFS traffic between nodes is encrypted, the essential metadata that nodes publish to the DHT - including their unique node identifiers (PeerIDs) and the CIDs of data that they're providing - is public. ![]() If you're worried about the implications of this, it might be worth taking additional measures such as disabling reproviding, encrypting sensitive content, or even running a private IPFS network if that's appropriate for you. On the other hand, freeing those building on IPFS to use the best privacy approach for the situation at hand ensures IPFS is useful to as many as possible. Explicitly implementing an approach to privacy within the IPFS core could "box in" future builders due to a lack of modularity, flexibility, and future-proofing. ![]() So, why doesn't the IPFS protocol itself explicitly have a privacy layer built-in? This is in line with key principles of the protocol's highly modular design - after all, different uses of IPFS over its lifetime may call for different approaches to privacy. Nodes announce a variety of information essential to the DHT's function - including their unique node identifiers (PeerIDs) and the CIDs of data that they're providing - and because of this, information about which nodes are retrieving and/or reproviding which CIDs is publicly available. Some key details on this are outlined below, but in short: While IPFS traffic between nodes is encrypted, the metadata those nodes publish to the DHT is public. This isn't something unique to the distributed web on both the d-web and the legacy web, traffic and other metadata can be monitored in ways that can infer a lot about a network and its users. What this does mean, however, is that IPFS itself isn't explicitly protecting knowledge about CIDs and the nodes that provide or retrieve them. This paradigm is one of IPFS's core strengths - at its most basic, it's essentially a globally distributed "server" of the network's total available data, referenceable both by the content itself (those CIDs) and by the participants (the nodes) who have or want the content. ![]() As a protocol for peer-to-peer data storage and delivery, IPFS is a public network: Nodes participating in the network store data affiliated with globally consistent content addresses (CIDs) and advertise that they have those CIDs available for other nodes to use through publicly viewable distributed hash tables (DHTs).
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