cerberusmod_3 said:
This has being a thing in recent years. I honestly don't know why.
I think, like I said earlier, that it's older politicians thinking, "we need to do something about x" and then getting a bad solution.
For example, there's a lot of copyrighted material on YouTube and it's easy to avoid takedowns, either flipping the video or slowing down the audio and watching it on 2x speed. I've seen full movies on there a week after they were released. And despite uploading a full movie, the worst that happens to the uploader is that they get their video taken down or demonetised.
You can see the EUs logic in a way, adding fines to website owners puts extra pressure on them to make sure their site's free of copyrighted material, and it might even work in terms of achieving that, but it fixes one issue and causes ten more.
Then AgeID, for good or bad, kids have easy access to porn, so then they think of something like that, track everyone and make the site responsible, and if sites don't check the age of their users they get banned in the EU. It's more non-tech-savvy people demanding something to be done, despite not knowing what.
But say AgeID becomes a thing, the website has to pay for the service, and users get tracked and have to go through whatever measures to prove they're of age. If that happens you can use a VPN. But if websites decide not implement it, and get blocked, users just need to set their dns servers to one that isn't their ISP's. It's so trivial to bypass being blocked that it makes the whole thing useless. Well, to be fair, most people don't know anything about dns servers and VPNs and it's those that it's aimed at.
cerberusmod_3 said:
Well, in the future, VPNs and Tor are the only choice for people who want privacy, if protesting don't work, or if they ever protest at all.I hate using these tools, honestly. VPNs are just pain to get since almost all of them needs to be paid, and Tor is just too slow for me.
I'd say they have been for a while. And although I use a paid VPN, the two free ones I linked are probably ok as well. Just don't search "free vpn" as you'll likely get a lot that sell your data.
With you saying that they're a pain, you could try a free one, that you feel is trustworthy, and have it auto-start on boot. You can also use a UK server if you wanted, as VPNs in the UK don't need to block things, just ISPs.
Aside from auto-starting one, the only other thing you can do is try and find a router that lets you put in OpenVPN credentials. That way you can have every device go through a VPN and not really need to think about it. The downside being that you'll need to disable it for any tv catch-up services.
In general, it's a case of privacy vs ease of use. How much privacy do you want, and what are you willing to put up with.
It took me a while to figure out what actually bothered me, and that's that I don't like having a lot of data about me in one place. So ISPs logging every site you visit, and Google logging as much as they can, that kind of thing. A VPN stops ISP logging, and I don't have a Google account.
A few years ago I was bored enough to try degooglifying my phone. Using LineageOS without the GApps stuff. Honestly I haven't noticed a difference. You can get the Yalp store, or Aurora, from F-Droid to still get apps from the play store without a google account.
Aside from the vpn most things I'd have done anyway, the privacy stuff just gave me a reason to do it. Like swapping my pc to Linux, Microsoft sending telemetry every 15 seconds and receiving "typing data," whatever that entails, was the extra push I needed to actually take the leap. And I learnt a lot, passing my graphics card directly to a Win10 virtual machine so I can still play games.
Aaand finally, I'd say the reason there aren't any protests is that nobody really cares. A lot aren't aware of the logging, but most wouldn't care if they knew about it either. There's also the flip side, it's really easy to get too paranoid with this kind of stuff.
Ok, one last thing, as an example of something I'm not bothered about. VPNs don't actually help to stop tracking. This site gets information from your browser, that any site can get, to show you how unique your browser "fingerprint" is:
After it's finished, click "show full results for fingerprinting" to get an idea of how unique your browser is, if a site wanted to track you by using this stuff. Currently I'm on an Android phone with all the Windows fonts copied onto it, so it's pretty damn unique.
Updated by anonymous