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Nondoxic
An anonymising intermediary between sender and their online friend | |
Sometimes, you want to send someone you only know online a gift, and asking them their postal address, or possibly even their email address is awkward.
So instead, you use your Nondoxic account to set it up. You send your friend a message, going something like "Hey, I wanted to get you something,
here is a code [16 character alphanumeric string]. Go to nondoxic.com, copy-paste this code and give them your address, and they'll post it to you direct from [the vendor]."
If you're the sender, you set up your nondoxic account, show them the url of the gift on a supported retailer, put in enough money to cover the purchase and their fee. They only make the purchase if the receiver gives a delivery address.
It also works for digital delivery via email - the receiver needs to give their email address. In this case, the email can be verified first.
No recipient address is ever disclosed to a sender.
Transactions involving gift-cards and other 'effectively cash' items are not accepted; Nondoxic is for anonymous gift delivery; it's not a money-laundering service.
[link]
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You need to patent and do this if it hasn't already been done. [+] [+] [+] |
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Would this be a sort of wrapper around a cryptocurrency? |
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//Would this be a sort of wrapper around a cryptocurrency?// |
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I am curious how you could read the idea and wonder that. Could you explain your thought process? |
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[loris] Assuming that all data is scrubbed after any transaction and no data is retained about either the sender or the recipient, this sounds so good as to be illegal. Someone, somewhere always wants to keep a record, unless the object is to obscure the matter beyond recovery or verification. |
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I can see how this would be seen as a "wrapper." But it is a wrapper for ANY transaction, not just illegal or crypto. Apple "hides" email with a proxy address from their servers. I use them to obfuscate purchases or subscriptions, but Apple still has a record. |
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"Everything leaves a mark." [+] |
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//Assuming that all data is scrubbed after any transaction and no data is retained about either the sender or the recipient, this sounds so good as to be illegal.// |
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I didn't suggest that 'all data would be scrubbed'. It wouldn't. The transactions would be documented in accordance with law.
The rule is the recipient's address isn't disclosed to the sender. (I believe the reverse can and should be feasible to manage too.) |
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Note that the service would only work with 'supported retailers'. This is to prevent someone setting up a 'shop' and collecting their target's address. |
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The low-hanging fruit would be large online retailers like Amazon, which could be trusted to post stuff directly.
Smaller businesses using Amazon could be authenticated individually. Until they were, the items would need to go via a relay, which would obviously add to the postage costs.
Of course, once small businesses are being validated, it would be straightforward to extend this to a general anonymising forwarding service. Every item would need to be individually checked, so that wouldn't be as cheap as online purchase anonymisation. |
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You make the assumption that the recipient has enough trust in your system to provide them information. |
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Or that they are willing to needlessly share information online. |
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I'm old enough to remember the days before kids would tell me "privacy is an obsolete concept". |
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//You make the assumption that the recipient has enough trust in your system to provide them information.// |
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Yeah, absolutely. The same is true of all retailers which deliver, though. |
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I think this case is actually a bit more plausible than a lot of security services, actually. |
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I mean, take VPNs. They advertise on the basis that you can't trust your ISP not to be compromised. Which is all very well - but if what you're worried about is that 'the state' could have served them with a gagging order so they can invisibly spy on you - that could happen equally well to the VPN company. |
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But here, what you're trying to mitigate against here is an individual - perhaps not even directly a bad actor, maybe a friendly but security-unaware individual leaking your data to one, leading to you getting doxxed somewhere down the line.
A company knowing that person A sent a present to B for just the legally mandated length of time... well, it's a straight substitution for the above, and I think many would agree that it's a lesser concern. And it's even an extra layer of protection against the 'state level actor' threat. |
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//Or that they are willing to needlessly share information online.// |
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Huh? This service would be for people who wanted to avoid sharing more information than they had to online. |
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Point taken - I guess what I meant to say is that if someone approached me with "I want to send you a gift, use this link to tell it where to send it" that I would just file it under junk mail and move on. If you don't know me well enough to coax my address out of me earlier, I wouldn't consider a gift from you anything more than a seed for some marketing venue or something. |
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It's a cool idea, it just seems open to abuse. |
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//I guess what I meant to say is that if someone approached me with "I want to send you a gift, use this link to tell it where to send it" that I would just file it under junk mail and move on.// |
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Well, sure, and with approaches from some random character you don't know, you'd be right to.
But this is for individuals who've known each other for a while and have an existing relationship with, on a website such as this one.
If you know someone really well, you may indeed be okay with giving them your address. But there's an awkward intermediate zone where maybe the relationship means more to one person than the other, or one of the two is much more nervous about being doxxed (for any number of legitimate reasons). Something like this would avoid the social awkwardness. |
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