this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Problem is that you're also blocking search engines to index your site, no?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Nope. Search engines should follow the robots.txt

[–] [email protected] -2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You misunderstand. Sometimes you want your public website to be indexed by search engines but not scraped for the next LLM model. If you disallow scraping alltogether, then you won't be indexed on the internet. That can be a problem.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago

I know that. Thats why I dont ban everyone but only those who dont follow the rules inside my robots.txt. All "sane" search engine crawlers should follow those so its no problem

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Robots.txt: Do not index this particular area.

Problem is that you’re also blocking search engines to index your site, no?

No. That's why they wrote "this particular area".

The point is to have an area of the site that serves no purpose other than to catch bots that ignore the rules in robots.txt. Legit search engine indexers will respect directives in robots.txt to avoid that area; they will still index everything else. Bad bots will ignore the directives, index the forbidden area anyway, and by doing so, reveal themselves in the server logs.

That's the trap, aka honeypot.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Not if they obeyed the rules