Why do Yoroi and Daedalus use lots of addresses “for privacy”?

Yoroi states “To protect your privacy, new addresses are generated automatically once you use them.” for external addresses and “Internal addresses (or ‘change’ addresses) maintain your privacy by obscuring which addresses belong to you on the blockchain” for internal addresses.

But CardanoScan, which tells me exactly to which stake key/account/wallet these addresses belong, is just a click away there. So what privacy do they speak of?

Couldn’t we just use the same address over and over again, since it’s publicly tied to our stake key/account/wallet, anyway?

Of course u can use one address as many times u wish

Okay, but I can’t tell Yoroi or Daedalus to just reuse the same address for the change, even if it should be possible by protocol.

And, more importantly, isn’t the privacy in the Yoroi explanations a false promise?

We regularly tell people exactly how much Ada they have in this and that wallet during “Where did my Ada go?” investigations. There is no privacy in that sense.

I’ve been wondering about this not being an issue for quite some time now. In fact I can see my wallet even with unused internal addresses on CardanoScan. Is everyone really comfortable with this?

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I’m post privacy enough (and only playing around with cryptos, so also low stakes enough) to be comfortable with it.

What I’m not comfortable with are these texts implying that there is some form of privacy. They should not be phrased that way.

In fact, they probably should explicitly warn that all addresses can be traced to the wallet and vice versa, so that everybody who knows one address of the wallet can always trace the complete history of that wallet.

Same here and no reason to obfuscate anything, it’s impossible anyway, we’ve seen this on another blockchain as a glimpse. Maybe it would’nt need a warning, but I don’t understand why privacy is phrased in the first place, they should know that everyone knows this is not true and the attempt to make it appear so really tickles me as a programmer.

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It is a misrepresentation of the product. They should reword it as “Security Engagement”. Remember what happened to Sketchers “Shape Ups”?