To what extent does my potential level of privacy change by hosting a public node?

Question

Let's say I run a node at home. Let's say I have a laptop from which I run a wallet only. I can access my node from within or from outside my home LAN, whether my node is public or not. I suppose the primary way to access my node from outside my home LAN - assuming it's not a public node - would be for me to poke a hole in my LAN's firewall via VPN tunnel. In that case, I figure my privacy level is no different than if I accessed the node from within my home LAN.

But what if I have a public node? What if I access my own public node from a remote location and sync my wallet and make transfers? Does my privacy level change?

Answer 1

The only way your privacy level is affected by running a public node and then using that public node as the remote node your wallet connects to is the extent to which your internet traffic is being monitored, which is really only possible by an ISP, except in more extenuating circumstances. Your internet traffic is generally already loosely monitored/logged, so there's not much of a change then.

The main privacy leak that results from connecting to a remote node is the fact that the remote node operator now has associated your IP with whatever lookups you made on the blockchain. If you're merely syncing your wallet, then this is nothing much to worry about anyway; but if you're making a transaction, then you must querying the blockchain to pull ring members, which is effectively a metadata leak. It's a similar leak of metadata to send the transaction through that remote node.

In the case of accessing your own remote node from an external location, you're only leaking that metadata to yourself, so your level of privacy arguably does not change.