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This is an issue for those of us who do anonymous peer review of publications that include references to the authors' web sites. It's bad enough that people have tried to identify me just by location in their logs.

I recommend using Tor now. But most people won't.




We did a a paper last year on a scientific web app; we specifically told reviewers up front that if they visited the actual page, they would show up in the logs, and gave them code+instructions for running it on localhost if they cared about that. I don't think most people are even aware; referees are domain experts, not web devs.


Tor won't help if you are logged into Google. The best solution here against that problem is incognito mode plus a VPN.


I only use Tor for anonymous reviewing purposes so I don't log into Google with it. But that's a good point.


> I only use Tor for anonymous reviewing purposes so I don't log into Google with it

Not to get too pedantic, but Tor is a protocol, not a browser - if you use your regular web browser over Tor, you’re still logged in.

On further thought, if you have only ever used a packaged ‘Tor browser’ that is both a browser and implements the Tor protocol, then I can see where you’d phrase it that way.


Wouldn't incognito mode block this particular attack?


Possibly, depending on how you use it. You can be logged in to Gmail while in incognito though (I sometimes use an incognito window to log in to a personal gmail account while I've got a work account open in a non-incognito window...)


That is an interesting use case. I think there are probably many similar ones.




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