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?

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.

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.

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.

When Nazis take power, everyone has something to hide

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

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.

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.