I believe your analogy is correct - people are naive now just as they were in 2011-12ish, but there is one huge difference (independent of all the hard work that might or might not get done to make LN privacy better):

LN transactions are not publically broadcast to (and then saved by) the entire world.

And even though actors will (and probably already are) trying to real time monitor and log traffic, it is very hard, or impossible, for them to do it, and it gets harder all the time.

Notice how this differs from on-chain - precisely because everyone has to be in lock step, you only need one monitoring node; on L2 the whole point is that everyone is not sharing state, so you realistically can never know what you don't know.

The only way to avoid getting sand in your shoes is to not play in the sand pit. Be sensible and maintain OPSEC. Avoiding sketchy 5hit is also recommended…

LN can be private or public.

You can have a transaction routed through the public LN or directly P2P.

LN can be as private or public as you want its to be, so can L1 if you try hard enough. You must've been on Twitter or Reddit recently. Also, privacy is irrelevant for half the real-world transactions people will make. If you order something from Amazon, you're providing a shipping address. Are you paying your insurance, rent, or utility? Those are tied to an SSN.

Blockchain forensics grossly overestimate their abilities so they can sell their software and products to businesses and governments. And if BTC layer 1 was lacking privacy in such a dramatic way, the majority of darkweb markets wouldn't accept it, the money launderers wouldn't use it, the eastern journalists wouldn't ask for donations in it, the ransomware hackers wouldn't post ransoms in it, the Chinese producers of fentanyl precursors for cartels wouldn't demand payment in it, etc. Also, go read up on the cases of people prosecuted for bitcoin-related crime. Quite complicated and difficult. And they always have the same dominant recurring theme: the criminal used a CEX.

Yeah, people think Lightning is private. Back when Cashu (the ecash implementation) was coming out, people were like... "But Lightning is already private?" And of course the Lightning they are probably using is custodial, so it's doxxed to the wallet... Of course, a thing about Lightning is it needs an "active surveiller", and there is no "forever record" so I think its kind of different than the onchain data that you can get arrested 5 years later for, its somone routing/surveilling you NOW that's how they get ya on Lightning. (Which is a thing, chainanalytics company Chainanalysis DOES surveillance, and the only way to do this IS to be a participant; a router.) I will say the rise of Mutiny is a very good sign. Those guys who ended up making Mutiny (along with Evan from Zeus) put out a website/research piece called lightningprivacy.com which got the ball rolling with people thinking about this stuff. But there is some wiggle-room as Lightning CAN be more private than it currently is. So far, wallets have optimized for reliability (actually working). In the future, once we have that more under control, we can have payments take paths that optimize for privacy, which is something i heard Mutiny hopes to do.

That's kinda like an apples to oranges comparison.

LN is overall more private, but of course still not perfect. For instance the sender is much better protected than the receiver. The receiver has to expose the public key of his node. If you want to receive privately for now you can operate with an LSP or use lnproxy for your invoices.

We're just as naive as we We're back in the day when we bought our BTC under KYC.. should have known better, I guess

There is undoubted misconception about bitcoin being anonymous, that is for sure for most of the bitcoin newcomers. Lightning, despite not being fully anon, it does provide more privacy.

The main point seems to be about education, IMO, if you look to Bitcoin overall looking solely for privacy, I don't think it will guarantee your objective.

It's like trying to build a house using only a hammer. You might get something, but far from the ideal.

Bitcoin-Lightning, aims to provide a broader experience for it's users. It has MORE privacy indeed, but can't aim to use BTC just because of this.

no IP address is private, understanding that point will reveal the truth.

Private or not ... for now, most ppl on LN have small % of their stack .... so, its kinda irrelevant to many

unannounced channels would be very difficult to track.

Regarding privacy, LN is definitely a big improvement in comparison to on chain transactions.

But...

Lightning network does not give any assurances. Things can still be (actively) tracked. Between on chain transactions and LN payments, the later is preferable, but don't expect it to be bullet proof.

If you need to transact privately (regardless of your reasons), perhaps Monero is a better tool for you.

😳😳😳😳 Wait... #zapping people are wrong? 🤔 What about tipping on Live streaming it's gone a be the same right? Maybe without Tax on LN.

It could be a lot more anonymous if there was competent and low enough latency hidden services possible somehow. Tor just is not good enough for a protocol that requires strong liveness, because it's got weak liveness.

Yes, many probably are. Its complicated.

I never use lightning for privacy. I simply mix some utxos a decent amount of times and only then transact.