<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>rtpg</author><text>I think the idea is that money reaches the company, the company then increments how much time you have left on the account, then deletes records linking payment to the account&lt;p&gt;Like you show up and give me $5, tell me it’s for account XYZ, I go into my admin console and increment the remaining usage time, but don’t write that you were the one giving me $5&lt;p&gt;There’s a window of time where the link exists of course! But you can get rid of it.&lt;p&gt;(I Hope that they are not storing things like an account start date or too many payment records… it could easily be deanonymized through time stamp correlation and the banks&amp;#x2F;stripe&amp;#x2F;PayPal have the data)</text><parent_chain><item><author>contravariant</author><text>Maybe but doesn&amp;#x27;t all of that apply equally to just about any payment method other than sending them cash anonymously?</text></item><item><author>capableweb</author><text>Presumably there are details linking together payments coming from Paypal and the account number. And obviously there is a link between account number and forwarded port. So following with that, you&amp;#x27;d be able to make the connection between the account number and Paypal account, which is definitely not private nor even pretending to protect your privacy.</text></item><item><author>contravariant</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s the exact reasoning behind that? How does paying via paypall impact the privacy of a forwarded port?&lt;p&gt;Is this something to do with state-level actors?</text></item><item><author>mig39</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always loved that Mullvad wouldn&amp;#x27;t let you accidentally compromise your own security.&lt;p&gt;For example, the port-forwarding feature won&amp;#x27;t work if you have a recurring subscription.&lt;p&gt;This just extends that kind of thinking to the service in general.&lt;p&gt;Been a Mullvad customer for a long time now, and it&amp;#x27;s always been awesome.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>We are removing the option to create new subscriptions</title><url>https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-option-to-create-new-subscriptions/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>bigiain</author><text>For a single payment, they can throw away all the metadata once the funds hit their bank account.&lt;p&gt;They _can&amp;#x27;t_ do that with recurring subscriptions, since they need something that links to your CC or PayPal details to re-bill it next month&amp;#x2F;year. They&amp;#x27;ve chosen to not do that any more, possibly as performative privacy, also possibly as having real privacy concerns for their clients, and also also possibly so they can tell law enforcement and courts to stop bothering them when needed. (realistically, it&amp;#x27;ll be some combination of those three things, and possibly others I&amp;#x27;ve not thought of, that triggered them into this)</text><parent_chain><item><author>contravariant</author><text>Maybe but doesn&amp;#x27;t all of that apply equally to just about any payment method other than sending them cash anonymously?</text></item><item><author>capableweb</author><text>Presumably there are details linking together payments coming from Paypal and the account number. And obviously there is a link between account number and forwarded port. So following with that, you&amp;#x27;d be able to make the connection between the account number and Paypal account, which is definitely not private nor even pretending to protect your privacy.</text></item><item><author>contravariant</author><text>What&amp;#x27;s the exact reasoning behind that? How does paying via paypall impact the privacy of a forwarded port?&lt;p&gt;Is this something to do with state-level actors?</text></item><item><author>mig39</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve always loved that Mullvad wouldn&amp;#x27;t let you accidentally compromise your own security.&lt;p&gt;For example, the port-forwarding feature won&amp;#x27;t work if you have a recurring subscription.&lt;p&gt;This just extends that kind of thinking to the service in general.&lt;p&gt;Been a Mullvad customer for a long time now, and it&amp;#x27;s always been awesome.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>We are removing the option to create new subscriptions</title><url>https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-option-to-create-new-subscriptions/</url></story>