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Comment by twsted | Hacker News Reader

> I'm confident the maintenance hassle will eventually outweigh my desire for privacy.

Nothing should outweigh your right for privacy.

Sure, but there's a cost to exercise that right. Right now, the cost of protecting myself from my ISP is quite high. I need to maintain DNS and VPN settings for every device in my home... many of which are personal devices of other family members with little patience for such techno-babble.

I want a product that reduces the cost of exercising my right to privacy, and allows me to pay that cost with money instead of time.

There are commercially-available routers which support running all traffic through a VPN. That should handle all the devices in your house.

A VPN doesn't actually provide more privacy, it just changes who can snoop on your data.

Privacy isn't an either/or. That's like saying closing your window curtains doesn't give you more privacy, because your phone might be wiretapped.

I don't agree with that analogy. The VPN takes away the ISP's snooping abilities, but gives snooping abilities to another company that wouldn't otherwise have it.

You're right, of course, but a VPN at least lets you make sure that the service that can snoop on your data doesn't want to snoop on your data, because they know you'll just leave them for another, more privacy conscious, provider if they do.

VPN providers have incentive to compete with each other and commitment to user privacy is an important selling point. ISPs have zero commitment to privacy and almost no reason to compete since users have no choice.

You're right, of course, but a VPN at least lets you make sure that the service that can snoop on your data doesn't want to snoop on your data, because they know you'll just leave them for another, more privacy conscious, provider if they do.

Only if you can tell that they're doing so. If they create two companies with no apparent connections, how would you know that VPN company A was selling your data through Marketing company B?

We are now getting pretty far down the rabbit hole.

Is this possible in theory, if your packets go in all directions (IPs) encrypted, not sure how you reassemble, but in theory, would the information then be whitewashed? I guess I'm asking, is it possible in principle, can you leak no information (including metadata) from IPv4?

Netflix for example does not work over vpn so the router would have to have a way to manage exceptions.

I would set up a tor endpoint on the home connection (to make the collected data as useless as possible).

Combining this with a regular VPN should be enough effective, with a minimum maintenance burden.

Privacy is weighed against public safety all the time. The question is at which point does it become unreasonable. Warrantless searches of American individuals just so happens to be where we, as Americans, draw the line.

On the other hand, don't mistake my assault on the technical validity of your sentence for disagreement with its intent. We should be outraged.

Shame on us for having allowed this to happen, and for the dangerous precendent it sets for local monopolies to sell your information.

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