this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2024
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Privacy
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If you don't pay money for something, you are the product. In this case it would be your net flow data. It's not a good idea to use a free service if you're worried about privacy
you're not the product on tor/orbot, protonVpn and riseUp.
Word of caution, If you are actually staying within the Onion network then sure Tor is a great option... The problem is most users just use the exit nodes to reach the clear web. This is a convenient feature of Tor but it's also the least secure use case. There are a very limited numbers of exit nodes so they are often overused and the majority of them are maintained by government controlled entities since it takes a certain level of legal protection to operate an exit node.
I stand by what I said. If you examine who supports those organizations, they are getting a benefit.
The US Navy supports tor more than anybody else. Not to mention all of the government-run exit notes. Now you're the product here, is the product watching your data? Or is the product providing noise for their clandestine operations? Tor is a great thing, 100%, but it is being supported by people who get a benefit from it.
I'm sure you can find a counter example, but the point is it's about incentives. If the incentives aren't aligned you can't trust it. Not for mission critical objectives
Tor is indeed about providing cover. US Military and US and German covert operations use it, and hide in the noise. But in those situations, it’s a win/win, as they provide funding and everyone gets to have a somewhat secure channel.
I’d argue though that in any case where you don’t control the exit node, you have no expectation of real privacy. So it becomes a question of how much you’re willing to trade.
what about the riseup and proton example he mentioned ? services like bitwarden etc are free but i don't see the users getting exploited in any way .
riseUp is slow. free vpn of Proton, depending on traffic and your exit, is a lot faster. Proton proved themselves to be trustable.
you can always upgrade to their paid service to have more options and servers, if you like. You can download your configurations to use your choice of addOn, app, software
mullVpn also is considerable, if you're going to pay (i don't use it but I've heard/read only + views
i use tor and orbot regularly. There, sadly, are too many sites that block them by default :/
Arguably, Germany having the ability if they really wanted to, to timing attack you to deanonymize (at great cost) and potentially burning a mal-state * https cert to read contents, is a VASTLY different risk profile to a proprietary VPN actively hoovering in everything it can to put in ad profiles (which are also used by state actors)
i don't care if they are atleast a bit legitimate . My isp is prolly selling me out more than they ever can anyway . and all they can see is the domain am going to right ? with the setup i described .