I do a pretty good job of hiding from everyone. And I don't use any "gadgets". Indeed, not using smartphones is a major boost to privacy. Otherwise, it's just multiple VMs, nested VPN chains, and Tor. All running on ~old i5 boxes that I bought used, for cash.
This condescension is so common and petty. It's like a real-estate broker laughing at someone for overpaying for a property, or a lawyer laughing that someone missed a court deadline they didn't know about.
Experts of complex systems generally know how to get what they want out of those systems. Finding ways for non-experts to do the same should not be sneered at.
Arguably a lot simpler than TFA goes on about.
The majority wouldn't know what VirtualBox and Whonix is, and that's before we start discussing what the benefits of privacy even are.
This is the disconnect we have with our peers who don't work in software/IT and why the right to privacy is being lost to jargon and technical expertise.
Privacy now is only a right to those who know how to employ it.
Except that now the technology has packed the entire world into a single "global village".
The AirVPN and IVPN clients for Windows are pretty much leak free. And dead simple. Buy account, download client, install, and run.
And for Whonix, it's just download and install VirtualBox. And then download Whonix, import into VirtualBox, and run.
And if you really haven't heard of Whonix, I find it hard to believe that you've looked seriously into privacy protection. But maybe I'm just biased.
Whonix / VM:
* Figuring out which version of virtual box is appropriate for her setup. The download page is not at all noob-friendly and there is no big "click this button to download for this OS" button. What does windows host mean? Does that mean windows? What's an SDK? Do I need the extension pack?
* Figuring out which version of Whonix is appropriate for the same reason. Download securely without verification? Is that ok? What's a signing key? Open pgp? What if she downloads the wrong one? Will it fuck something up?
* Feeling comfortable employing a VM. She has never used a VM and would have no idea what was going on when a different OS appeared within her OS. This could be very unnerving because it seems incorrect. The idea of importing an image would be so foreign that she might not be able to figure out how to do it using the virtualbox interface.
* Trivial tasks on whonix. She wouldn't know how to do trivial things on Whonix because it is has a totally different UI than Mac or Windows. Most non-technical people memorize what they have to do to accomplish tasks without actually understanding what they are doing so they can't port that knowledge to another platform.
* Troubleshootong. She would not be able to use Google for help because she can't form the queries correctly to ask what she wants.
VPN:
* Determining which VPN(s) to use and signing up. There are about 100 options and she has no way to evaluate the quality.
* Determining whether the VPN was set up correctly. Leak tests? Checking external IP? What's an IP?
* Understanding why certain things don't work anymore. Why can't she print documents anymore? Why are certain sites going to the Canadian page instead of the regular .com page? Why isn't Netflix working anymore? Why is she constantly dealing with captcha?
* Understanding why everything is so slow
She would quickly realize she is in over her head, get frustrated, and then feel embarrassed because she would have to call me for help with what you described as a "trivial task". She would probably just not do it to save herself from the embarrassment / "wasting my time".
That's what's so good about Tails. You just boot it, and have a secure Debian system with Tor. But there are some vulnerabilities. Especially because the Tor daemon and userland are not isolated.
It one point, I experimented with packing VirtualBox, a pfSense VPN gateway, and Whonix, in a LiveDVD. It required 8GB RAM, and took minutes to boot. But once it was up, it was quite snappy, because it was all in RAM.
Anyway, it would be cool if someone could pack all of that in an app.
There's a product/market/founder fit in there somewhere.
Like you say, most people I spoke to said they wouldn't pay. The folks who were serious abt privacy are happy to root their phones and use XPrivacyMod and Adguard, which are as comprehensive a solution you can get on Android short of flashing a ROM like GrapheneOS.
We do plan to charge however, a nominal fee, as low as 50¢ a year. Haven't figured out that yet, but a long way to go. The product needs to be built first.
> Within three weeks, I got tired of being careful. My faraday bag is somewhere in the back of my car, because I like to use my phone for GPS and playing podcasts. I stopped wearing my Reflectacles in public. I haven’t scrubbed my old tweets away with Jumbo in a while. I use my Visa to buy stuff from Amazon, which it delivers to my house. I plugged Alexa back in. Daniel Gillmor of the American Civil Liberties Union wasn’t surprised. “I don’t think the fix to privacy is something that can be done by an individual alone, in the same way I can’t solve the pollution problem by recycling on my own,” he says.
> Until people demand a law that makes privacy the default, I’m going to try to remember, each time I click on something, that free things aren’t free. That when I send an email or a text outside of Signal or MySudo, I should expect those messages to one day be seen. And that if I ever really need privacy, I should feel a little badly about what is going to happen to Leo Selvaggio.
So basically, he's just poking fun at people who try being private. And he doesn't even mention compartmentalization. You know, the first rule of Fight Club?
I mean, I have a phone. Admittedly, not a smartphone. But I do call people. Mainly my wife and medical services, but whatever. And I do get tracked, at least by cell towers. But none of that matters, because I don't talk about Mirimir and my other personas.
I use a credit card for Amazon too. But I just don't buy anything that's linked to anything that Mirimir or my other personas are up to. Including the box that I'm typing this on, just in case some jerks are tracking firmware codes.
And the part about "demanding a law" is just foolish. We already have laws, but they're ignored all the time.