Ark is a client server protocol so everyone running their own server would defeat the point.
Even while using Lightning there are significant ways a third-party wallet service can fingerprint your information and collect it.
There are no perfect solutions.
"Even while using Lightning there are significant ways a third-party wallet service can fingerprint your information and collect it." Sure, like, if you send a Lightning Network payment through Coinbase, assume they have shared that payment with every government on earth. Fine, Coinbase discloses this in their T&C, that's what you are in for if you use Coinbase -- they don't try to pretend otherwise.
But Spark -- when you look at this page -- https://docs.spark.money/spark/sovereignty -- it looks like some kind of serious open-source protocol that Bitcoin people would take seriously and use, right?
Cyberpunk-like, self-custodial, all the good things. They don't say they "Oh, and by the way, all this fancy stuff requires that you hit our web servers and we'll keep track of every transaction and might give your data to the state of Israel if they ask for it." (or whatever.)
Oh -- but also -- if you pay a Lightning invoice -- even on Coinbase... they CAN NOT and DO NOT know the recipient of that invoice. (Unless, of course, the recipient is LightSpark, Coinbase, or I guess another KYC-oriented company, and they share data.)
Great minds like nostr:npub1yxp7j36cfqws7yj0hkfu2mx25308u4zua6ud22zglxp98ayhh96s8c399s have spent years explaining this -- the Lightning Network, used properly, is a privacy superpower.
I fully accept that Spark (and probably Ark?) just aren't good for privacy. And that's cool and 98.5% of people don't care and it doesn't matter. But it should also be DISCLOSED to users. Lightspark should put this on their docs page, just something like "All payments made through Spark go through our servers via a GraphQL endpoint."
