The social media platform X (formerly Twitter) released a new feature that mandatorily discloses the country where an account holder is located. Although the feature was promoted as a way to ensure platform integrity, it has raised severe privacy concerns within the crypto community and among Web3 leaders.
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, initially viewed the feature favorably, but later changed his position. He called the feature “dangerous” and stated that disclosing one’s country without even providing an opt-out option is “incorrect.” The main reason for these concerns is that, in the crypto world, a threat to privacy can be equivalent to losing physical security, rather than just losing online anonymity.
Mandatory Doxing’ and Security Risk
Hayden Adams, the founder of Uniswap, offered much harsher criticism of X’s new feature. He condemned it as “mandatory doxing” and called it “insane.” Doxing refers to the act of publishing an individual’s private and identifiable information (here, location) without their consent.
The main fear prevalent among crypto users is:
- Threat to High-Value Investors: This location information can be used by malicious actors to easily track individuals known as “crypto whales”—those holding high crypto assets—to facilitate physical attacks, kidnapping, or extortion. Specifying a country significantly narrows the possible attack vector.
- Retroactive Rugpull: Buterin pointed out that privacy-conscious users felt their privacy was “retroactively rugpulled” (a crypto term for a sudden financial scam) without any alternative. This means the social contract for privacy that existed when the account was created on X has been suddenly and unilaterally violated by the X platform.
Opt-In Visibility Controversy and Web3 Ethos
Many crypto executives, including Andrei David, CTO of Summer.fi, argue that privacy-related features should always start with the “least revealing setting” enabled by default. However, X compels users to actively navigate the settings to turn the feature off.
This illustrates the fundamental conflict between Centralized Platform Control (X) and the Decentralized Web3 Ethos. The core philosophy of Web3 is to prioritize user privacy and consent by default.
Buterin further stated that, “While in most cases, disclosing the country still leaves a large anonymity set, for some, even the few bits that leaked are dangerous.” This reflects the deep-seated feeling among crypto investors that even a small amount of leaked information can severely compromise their safety.
Opt-Out Mechanism and Political Interference
One X user pointed out that there is a way for concerned users to opt out of the feature.
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Opt-Out Mechanism: This can be managed by navigating to Settings & privacy → privacy & safety and disabling “country visibility” or changing the setting to display location as a region/continent instead of a country.
However, there are those who support the feature. Some, including crypto venture capitalist Nic Carter, argue that the feature is necessary to prevent foreign accounts from interfering in a country’s political activities by pretending to originate from that nation. This highlights a clear conflict between ensuring platform integrity and individual privacy.
The Centralized Risk
X’s mandatory location feature serves as a crucial reminder to the global crypto and Web3 community: The platform operator can change your privacy settings at any time, for any reason.
Vitalik Buterin’s warning underscores how centralized platforms like X, while acting in the name of security and compliance, can fail to consider the physical and financial risks to high-value users. This re-emphasizes the need for crypto users to move towards decentralized systems that offer privacy settings by default to mitigate these concerns.
