My fear is that special AI systems will appear that will analyze every message I send and every action on my device.
What skills should I have? What Linux knowledge should I have? What should I know about routers and how the Internet works, VPN, and so on?
I’m still on Windows, and it’s starting to scare me. I just found out that the system records almost everything I do and sends the data to servers. And someone also told me that if I want an anonymous system, I have to figure it out myself, completely.
And on the whole your ISP knows what you are doing. It’s not entirely true unless you are in specific countries where you have a government CA certificate installed in your browser.
A normal ISP can see you are accessing bing or google, but don’t know what you are searching for. They can see you are accessing Netflix, but can’t see what show you are watching. VPN providers will likely see the same information.
More concerning is your browser, it will know what show you are watching and what thing you searched for on Bing or Google.
+1
A lot of the VPN hype is sort of left over from before we had “https” everywhere. Most of your Internet traffic is encrypted these days.
I guess there’s a slight advantage with VPNs (vs ISPs) having your data is you can at least choose your VPN provider more freely than you can choose your ISP so in theory you can pick one you can trust.
But this is chasing a pretty small amount of anonymity for most people. It’s not worth it most of the time.
And tbh, you’re most likely worried about the Ad companies and social media giants, not your ISP.
I mean, vpns have additional value by allowing people to circumvent geoblocks, possibly local censorship, and in general the whole nonsense tied to access based on where you are and what nationality you have.
Definitely. And theres also the ability to use it to “hide in the crowd” if you have decent OPSEC and are being anonymous in other ways.