November 24th, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin shared in a post regarding the prediction of the “Displaying Account Country” feature: In the short term, it will lead to a lot of positive impacts. In the medium term, experienced players will find ways to disguise themselves as coming from a different country. There are countless means to rent someone else’s passport, phone number, IP address, and so on. It would be somewhat challenging to fake 1 million accounts with fake locations, but it would be extremely easy to fake one account with a false location and then operate it to gain 1 million followers. Six months later, those political water army accounts that are actually located in a random Eurasian country but operate under names like “Defenders of Western Civilization” are likely to change their location tags to “USA” or “UK”. (The above is what I think will happen, not what I hope to see. What I hope for is: (i) We can truly observe different communities’ viewpoints on different topics, and this is not a signal that can be easily forged. (ii) These “communities” are not just highly identifiable narrow labels such as countries or educational backgrounds but a more widespread, spontaneous, multi-source evidence-based structure. However, I believe that it is very difficult to maintain such a system in a hostile environment.) Upon further consideration, I also agree with the viewpoints expressed by the respondents: it is inappropriate to display a user’s country without their consent and without providing any option to opt out (even without a “disable account” as a last resort option). In most cases, displaying country information will still maintain a large amount of anonymity, but there are indeed some people for whom even a little bit of data leakage is very dangerous. They should not be unilaterally deprived of their privacy by the platform without any means of redress.
