this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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Privacy
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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
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I disagree with your #3 point. There is nothing stopping you from disclosing personally identifiable information through Tor or a VPN. They can help you with keeping private, but they don’t do anything if you don’t know how to use them for privacy.
The Tor browser resists fingerprinting, but a VPN doesn’t. A VPN only keeps your IP address private, and your IP address isn’t really that interesting to the big tracker companies.
I would say something more like Firefox’s container tabs is way more useful for privacy.
Your IP address is everything to companies that track you. It's way easier to automate software to collate data on a range of IP addresses than it is to create bespoke automation or gasp employ somebody to create data points on you. If you're in the habit of identifying yourself online by signing all of your posts with your name, age, and email address, sure, a VPN won't keep you 100% private, and your DNS lookups are still plaintext, but if you change your server periodically and don't provide any details about who you are, what the hell is an ad serving company going to do with a range of known VPN server IP addresses?
Not really. I know Google doesn’t associate an IP address. You can test it in a private window.
Also that would be silly. Most families share an IP address, so your tracking data would be all mixed up for the whole family. And most people’s IP address changes every month or two, so again, your tracking data would be mixed up with the previous family who used that IP.
IP address is nearly useless as a tracking mechanism. You can use it to get someone’s approximate location, and that’s about it.