scytale

Touch grass? Not OP, but when I’m out of the house, it’s because I need to do something, so I’m barely on my phone except for navigation, the occasional text/call, and paying for stuff. Otherwise, I use my laptop most of the time (at home and at work).

Walk without rhythm.

I think you need to step back and review your threat model. Grab a pen and paper or open a spreadsheet. List all the tech you use for various things. Then determine what threats you are protecting yourself from for each. Try to use a scoring system to rank importance/criticality and convenience. Then try to find the balance, which ones you’re willing to sacrifice convenience for and ones you are willing to compromise. Then take action one by one.

Well privacy doesn’t necessarily mean anonymity. They are different things and have different solutions. A VPN gives you privacy but doesn’t automatically make you anonymous. I think the other comment has a good point that VPNs are overselling their products. And it’s true, defense-in-depth is the proper way to go about it, and not to rely on one thing to solve all your problems.

I’ve had no issues so far. Response times have been relatively quick, nothing unusual.

Because everyone else they know is there. If the people they follow and interact with moved to Mastodon or switched messengers to Signal, you’ll see how quickly they will move. It’s hard to convince someone to sign up or install a new app if it’s only you they’ll find there. I was able to switch my family over to Signal and they literally use it only for family group chats, because they don’t know anyone else who uses it. And they were a little easier to convince because they’re family. I won’t be able to convince people with less close ties to me like friends, acquaintances, and neighbors.

They had fun writing this article:

allow an attacker to get a corporate email account with which to conduct a little filet-o-phishing

with no server-side checking, allowing a Hamburglar to order food for free

eventually got through to a security McEngineer who said that they were “too busy” to fix the flaw

Coincidentally, I saw on linkedin last night they were hiring a Security Operations manager. They should get an Appsec person instead to fix those issues.

You won’t get anywhere if you use the “leave your bathroom door open” or “unlock your phone and give it to me” arguments, because to them that is a different thing and they pretty much know what it means to have privacy on those aspects. What they don’t care about are the things they don’t see (i.e. social media tracking, location data access, etc.) and that’s what they consider nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear.

So the best examples I could think of to counter those arguments are:

• Surveillance pricing
• Abysmal security of home security cameras

If they DO care that prices on the stuff they buy is influenced based on their habits and the data companies collect on them, or if they DO care that anyone can potentially tap into their home cameras to watch even just their outdoor cameras (let alone indoor ones), then they DO care about privacy and just don’t realize it.

Like I said, it’s only as vpn friendly as the instance admin wants it to be. It’s not the platform that’s vpn averse, it’s the person/people running it. The admin may or may not have a legit reason for blocking VPNs. Who knows, maybe the instance is being attacked so they temporarily blocked VPNs.

If it’s your home instance that’s doing it, then you should consider moving to another instance that aligns more to your values.

Remember that lemmy is not one monolithic structure. User experience will vary from instance to instance. If your instance or an instance you’re visiting is blocking you when on vpn, it’s that instance’s admins who decided to do that. It would be better to ask in their support or meta community.

If it’s your own home instance and you believe what they’re doing is anti-privacy, then they do not align with your values and you should consider moving to another instance that does.

Pick a server somewhere in southeast Asia. I don’t have issues with youtube with locations outside of western and first world countries.