MX Linux Forum

Isn't that like adobe does now? Once your one year expires your installed software becomes useless.

I'm privacy conscious. I don't consider this community to be particularly biased in that way (in general).

I use the best paid for VPN's I can find - Air for some years & now PIA. Both of them take care of DNS themselves, & keep no logs - proven in court.

I lock up whatever browser that I'm using as best I can (if I can't, I don't use it), to the point that I often have to unblock certain parts of a website to be able to view it - or - I just move right along, after viewing the number of known invasive &/or potentially dangerous scripts that my settings have blocked.

Some people have the attitude of "I don't do anything wrong, I'm boring, so track away". I remember a couple of decades ago, when the federal & state governments in my country would vigorously prosecute anyone caught invading an individual's privacy, in ways that are, by comparison, inconsequential to the ways that they themselves do it now. Let alone any other entity that has the desire to do so. All quite legally.

The likes of "Big Brother" could not exist without computers.

I consider personal privacy to be an individual right. I am currently, most certainly, in a small minority. I believe that sometime in the future people will wake up to what has been stolen from them & that this situation will eventually change.

Sophisticated demographic manipulating software be damned!

Most people don't realize what a VPN can do. All what a VPN does is encrypt your data to the VPN server. It doesn't matter if that VPN keeps logs or not because the NSA is keeping logs especially if that VPN is located in the U.S. and if it's in the 14 eyes the NSA and other government's agencies most likely will be keeping logs. As for DNS servers most good VPNs have their own they use. A VPN is only protecting you against hackers on WiFi and helps hide some but not all information from all kinds of entities. VPN are good but are not as good as most people think.

Beyond accurate technical instruction, forums are a theater for personal opinion & the broad generalisations of people that have both the time & the inclination to participate same.

handy wrote: ↑Mon Jan 14, 2019 5:42 pm Beyond accurate technical instruction, forums are a theater for personal opinion & the broad generalisations of people that have both the time & the inclination to participate same.

Yep, also people have different views what privacy means and what are they willing to give away, for example I don't mind of Google knows more about me, I'm fine with that in my case I prefer Google than other random company that might have lax data policy... some people trust a company some people trust organization, some people trust Google Chrome some Firefox, some won't touch with 10 foot pole either... we are diverse in that way.

After the Snowden revelations I seriously considered getting off of the Internet for good. But I surmised that it would limit me in unhealthy ways, and impact my quality of life if I did so. Nevertheless, I permanently rid myself of Facebook and Twitter at that time. I pulled years of email off of servers, and shut down unnecessary web activity. I had done nothing criminal, but I did not know until then that any email on a server over 6 mos is open game to the U.S. government, and I had years of conversations with a friend who had died after a surgery not long before 2013 and it angered me that our email was not private. Indeed, I no longer consider anything private on the Internet. So it seriously impacted my relationship with the Internet.
Yet my music, video and TV, ebooks, so many things I need daily depends upon the Internet. But I don't kid myself. If you are on the Internet, you no longer have a private life. And I do not trust VPN's. Would not be surprised if the U.S. government owns them all. Not paranoid, but Snowden taught us your worst case of Paranoia is probably underestimating the reality of what these governments can do. And what these mega-tech companies can do may be worse.