Ask Lemmy

Who do you trust more, the neighbor who closes their blinds or the neighbor running around house to house trying to look in everyone's windows?

Privacy should be the default, not the exception.

You could be another user resisting surveillance, or another user contributing to it.

The choice is yours.

Here's a free VPN: https://riseup.net/en/vpn

Back in the days before cell phones, when landlines were ubiquitous, people in more rural areas had what they called "party lines." It was a single telephone line shared between multiple houses. You knew which house an incoming call was for based on the ring pattern. Your neighbors could also pick up the receiver, very quietly, and listen in on your phone calls if they wanted too.

Party lines are long gone but Internet communications have their own ways of being "listened in on." A lot of traffic transmitted over the Internet is encrypted; with TLS for instance. But, some of it isn't. If you use traditional DNS -- UDP over port 53 -- everyone in between you and the DNS server can see which websites you're visiting.

I'm not concerned about my privacy because I have something to hide. I'm concerned about it because my personal business is my business. Not anyone else's.

Some things should be private. Some things should be secret. Not because there's anything wrong with them, but simply because they're yours and you want to keep them that way.

It's completely legal for me to watch 70s pornography while drinking hard liquor and painting pentagrams on my walls and sacrificing small animals to Baal.

I'm not going to videotape it and show my grandmother.

As a private person doing nothing illegal, is there value in having curtains on your windows ?

It's not a question of whether there are things I'd like to hide, and why I want to hide them. It's simply a natural desire to only disclose my personal affairs to specific parties for specific purposes.

Suppose I go to the pharmacy for some paracetamol and they ask to see a list of all the people I've emailed in the last 6 months, or at the supermarket I need to share my search history for the last 6 months.

There's nothing illegal or anything I would be really embarrassed about, but it would be absolutely absurd. That's the way the modern internet is built though.

Yes. Personalized pricing relies on harvesting data. Don't get played. Hackers and scammers rely on getting data on you. Don't give it to them.

And everyone has something to hide. Do you have cancer? An STD? An affair? Those are all legal, but depending on the circumstances, you might get fucked if the whole town knew. Protect your data.

“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him.”

It’s not about whether or not you’re doing anything wrong, it’s about how the powers that be can decide at any point that what you’re doing is wrong when it’s convenient to them.

Of course. Th legal things you do today can be made illegal tomorrow.

I'm always using a proton vpn. As well as a hardened librewolf and default ironfox. I definitly get more captchas and there are some sites that don't load up, but I have yet found a site that blocks me that I'd turn the vpn off for.

Somethings to note though:

I have been suspended from esty after buying stuff, likely from the vpn. I appealed but nothing has really happened.

Youtube can be a pain, I no longer use google accounts and I don't bother using their captchs. I just shuffle around on my vpn until I'm no longer a bot.

Streaming; netflix is fine, though I stick to my home country normally.

I tried a couple of other with limited success, nowadays I only use netflix on my compy with a vanilla firefox

I think I tried Paramount and it wasn't working out. But it may have been because of it not available in my contry or something.

Disney was givin me a lot of trouble, but I think I did get it to work on my phone with the vpn once. (Had to restart the phone with Disney+ disabled first, the it worked.)

Honesty it's not that bad.
Also as I was writing this I was going list out my privacy set up, but I realized I think I've become meme.

Took me a minute to find it again, but there was an excellent essay answering this question. From https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/ :

There's a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, "I have nothing to hide." It's not the gentle pity you'd have for the naive. It's the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren't just surrendering their own liberty. They're instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it's time they were told so.

...

On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state's pool, making any ripple of dissent ... any deviation ... starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.

While your ISP can't see everything, they can see metadata. They can see which websites you go to, which social media you use the most, where you bank, where you shop, etc. How much do you think it would take for your ISP to sell that data? If you happen to live somewhere there are laws againat that, you are slightly less at risk. Fines are only a deterrant if they're more than what's being offered for your data.

That being said, this only protects you against your ISP or other purely ipaddress based info gatherers. Apps/social media/websites don't purely use ipaddresses to track you.

When Nazis take power, everyone has something to hide

But yes, protection from compromised LANs or public wi-fi

Encrypt your DNS as well, then ISP can't even see what you're searching for

https://youtu.be/xAo61IaXun8

Some non-polotical reasons:

If you live in the US there's a better chance than not that your ISP is selling your personal data. Outside US idk, maybe still though. Either way you're putting a lot of trust in a telecom company.

Since net neutrality was removed your traffic can be throttled based on what type of traffic it is, so having it all encrypted for the first hop at least has it treated all the same.

Two political ones I haven't seen mentioned yet:

You don't actually know you don't have anything to hide. Again, assuming US, the amount of federal laws there are couldn't fit in a pickup truck if they were all printed out. And if someone's looking to make an example of you then you shouldn't make it easy for them to find a reason. My favorite example is that throwing out mail that isn't addressed to you (like junk mail for a previous tenant etc) is a felony.

You also could be falsely accused of a crime. For example, your phone gave out it's location info near a place where coincidentally an actual crime had taken place. Best to not give that information freely to everyone and have to pony up $10k for a lawyer for nothing.

The legal thing you’re doing today might not be legal tomorrow – and there’s potential for you having been recorded doing that suddenly illegal thing in the past.

Asvertising and surveillance pricing. Even if you aren’t doing anything illegal, data about your internet habits is being collected, stored, and sold in order to serve you ads and potentially affect the prices of things you spend on.

I currently use the TOR browser when I'm searching for things I'd rather for-profit companies didn't know, like health care information.

I have considered getting a VPN because I live in Texas, where a lot of perfectly legal content has been blocked "to protect the children," and because I know my political searches will be turned over to the government if Trump or Abbot asks for them.

Yes. Absolutely. Privacy is for everyone.

You are assuming that the things legal and illegal today will continue to align with your morality. "I don't do anything bad" only holds value while you and your governing body share beliefs.

What if tomorrow you disagree? Suddenly there would be a long history of potentially incriminating internet history associated with you. What if it's for something you can't even control, such as "using the internet while female" in a society that recently banned women from using the internet?

This level of paranoia shouldn't be required yet look at the state of the world.

A VPN doesn't just allow you to change your location. It's a tunnel between you and someone you trust (a VPN provider). All your traffic shows up as originating from the trusted partners address do that it cannot be traced back to you. They offer this to lots of customers and if your VPN provider is worth their salt, anonymizes these interactions so that they can't even tell people who did what.

If you're in the UK, suddenly being in a different country can be beneficial if you don't feel like having your face scanned or giving away your credit card details before engaging in some self-care.

There's value in real privacy friendly VPNs (think Mullvad), otherwise you just end up trusting some other, probably very shady actors with all your data instead.

Unless you need one for specific things like using free wifi safely, torrenting or getting around restrictions then there is not much benefit.

Most VPNs won't even work for daily browsing as far as I'm aware. You'll get hit with way more captchas and potentially just not be able to access certain sites because someone has either got the vpn providers ip banned temporarily on the site or the site bans IP addresses associated with servers.

Personally, for generic browsing, I'm not too concerned if my ISP can see the domain names I'm accessing. I, as you probably do, only use HTTPS everywhere so the domain name is the most they'll know, but you can do some work to try limiting exposure with DNS over HTTPS (DoH), etc if you want to.

There's also TLS 1.3 addition of ECH which further helps by hiding the hostname.

Of course your ISP will always know the IP address you send packets to, but that is an even smaller problem.

And my final note: just use one when you need to, I don't think it's necessary to have one on 24/7 at home like some people advise and NEVER use a free vpn or one of the more mainstream ones (mullvad is best, second choice is AirVPN).

Doing nothing illegal, today...

Yes, even if you trust people in positions of power with access to that data which there are tons of evidence to not do that, laws change and the people enforcing the laws change. Not using a VPN is telling your ISP and potentially thousands of advertisers and dozens of governments everything you search for, private messages if you're not using a peer to peer encrypted messaging app, and all of the meta data indicating where you are & when you sleep or are alone. Intelligence agencies run programs like those leaked (not just the US but definitely including them) and when there was little to no political backlash when those were revealed you can assume they are doing much worse now.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say." - Snowden

Either everyone's data is public and transparent or nobody's is, partial selection is just asking to be used as a weapon against the people being snooped on.

I use mine to maintain control of my home server while out of the house

I don't know much about computer networks but all I know is when I go to my friend's house he insists I connect to his Wi-Fi but I use my VPN I don't know why but I always do because I learned from Reddit and Lemmy & YouTube type people that VPNs are a wise thing to use, and it upsets him I think because he cannot spy on what I'm doing. Because he has mentioned in the past some people who lived in his house he spied on all their internet activity because they were doing bad things. So if he could spy on people's internet activity when they are connected to his Wi-Fi in his house, he probably could spy on mine too but apparently he couldn't because I was using a VPN 🤷🏼‍♀️

I don't do anything nefarious or unethical on the internet, but I'd rather not my boyfriend be spying on everything I do. Just like I wouldn't want anybody staring at me constantly all day long, that's creepy. I just use the internet as my leisure time until I fall asleep.

We use VPNs at work a lot for protecting traffic as it passes over the public internet between distant sites. From a security perspective, it's better not to give devices direct access to the internet if they don't actually need it. That's stuff we're running ourselves though; not a commercial VPN service we're paying for.

Unfortunately we are living in times where even the most sane countries are getting to the point where completely reasonable things may be seen as illegal, or used against you, in the future.

It's not unreasonable to imagine that insurance companies/banks may soon (if not already) buy your internet traffic to get a profile of you. If that profile matches some risk factors, higher interest rates or premiums could be a thing.

Even the UK has started flexing authoritarian lately with the Palestine action proscription and suppression of protest. There is certainly a trend in modern politics to try to track people online, and they are starting with pornography to normalise it, using CSAM as an excuse to enact more extreme legislation.

Immigration and border authorities are also beginning to expand digital backgrounds for travellers or immigrants.

It's not necessarily about what is illegal today, in your current location, but it's about what might be considered illegal or "bad" in the future and weaponised against you.

Don't assume that your current situation will always be the case. The right to privacy is not for people to do illegal things, the right to privacy is to protect you against authoritarian governments if/when they may intersect with your life.

But illegal is totally subjective

• Watching region-locked content without pirating it.

• buying games that are cheaper elsewhere in the world

What you consider legal now, could be considered grounds for arrest or worse if the world changes. And the world is always changing.

That said, if you have no interest in torrenting files or starting insurrections out of your basement, a VPN isn't going to do much for you. They're barely effective for actually protecting you if the actual government wanted to go after you for something and your data and personal info is already compromised by the fact that you're here, chatting on the internet. If you just browse social media it will give you a bigger headache to have it on since most sites now block VPN traffic and reddit will even permanently shadowban you if you log in under a VPN.

Yes, definitely! If you are on public wifi, work wifi, or your home router is compromised (more likely than you think), the VPN can protect your traffic from being intercepted. It can also help you get around censorship if you live in a place where that is a problem.

Privacy is also important, even if you aren't doing anything wrong, because it's not just police watching, but all sorts of companies and individuals who will gladly harvest and sell your data, put you at risk, and give you nothing for it.

You are subject to over 300,000 laws. How do you know you're doing nothing illegal?

Doing anything while connected to open Wi-Fi networks. All it takes to eavesdrop on an open Wi-Fi network is a laptop and proximity. Although they can't eavesdrop on your SSL/TLS traffic, they can (and will) pick up on (insecure) DNS requests, which gives them at least the domains of any websites and services that you use (if not the specific pages).