Our method is based on a simple observation. In our model, an observer who is one of g neighbors of the actual requester can expect to receive about 1/g of all requests, due to FOAF routing. Block locations, derived from a hash, are modeled as being evenly distributed on the circle. If the observer is actually two hops away from the original requester, then only about 1/gh of the requests will be received, assuming the requester has h neighbors.
PDF document Levine 2020
Combined with harvesting and adaptive search attacks, this attack explains why opennet is regarded by many core developers as hopelessly insecure. If you want good security you need to connect only to friends.
Freenet help
If somebody collects lot of hashes they can know what files a neighbour node is downloading and they also know the IP address. I thought Freenet was better than that. The friends only thing is not good. Do you have a friend that you want to know what you are downloading. If you collect enough “friends” there will at least one that will report what you are downloading.
The request must do a few hops before it is possible to see what is requested to make this secure.
I have not used Freenet for many years.