Privacy practices
Habits that keep your activity among many others, each tied to the way privacy is lost that it addresses.
The protocol keeps the inside of the pool private. Whether your deposits and withdrawals can be paired from the outside depends partly on how you use it. These habits address the patterns on how privacy is lost.
At the edges
- Leave value in the pool for a while. A withdrawal that follows a deposit by minutes is easier to pair than one that follows it by weeks, with other activity in between.
- Do not withdraw what you deposited. Splitting a deposit into several withdrawals of different amounts, or withdrawing a round figure out of an odd one, removes the easiest match.
- Prefer common amounts. A deposit of 100 is one of many. A deposit of 1,234.567 is one of one.
- Withdraw to an address that is not already yours in public. Registration publicly ties both your main wallet and your platform wallet to your account, and deposits come from the platform wallet, so withdrawing to either links the two ends yourself.
Inside the pool
- Pay the relayer tip in a common token, or a token your transaction does not move, if you would rather not reveal which token moved. The tip is public.
- Keep spending identity-owned notes. Program-owned notes publish their owner when spent.
- Expect the recipient to know you. A transfer funded by your own notes tells the recipient your identity commitment.
Around the transaction
- Use a relayer for spends so your wallet does not sign them.
- Consider your network address. The relayer, Umbra's gateway and your RPC provider see where your requests come from. A network-level privacy tool changes that; the protocol cannot.
- Keep the account signature on your device. Whoever has it has your account. See the account signature.
What no habit changes
- Registration links your wallets to your identity commitment.
- The indexer's context service sees which notes you spend.
These come from how the protocol works today, not from how you use it. See what is private and what is visible.
Related
Last updated
How privacy is lost
Every known way information about your activity leaves the protocol, from the public edges of the pool to the services a transaction passes through.
Metadata and network privacy
What leaves your device besides the transaction itself, who receives it, and what the protocol can and cannot do about it.