this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2024
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I still wonder what they are buying and from who. If it's the ISP I kind of wonder what they still get from me since I don't use their DNS servers and the ones I point to are setup for DoH for all traffic at home. I also use other stuff for added privacy. It doesn't take a lot of effort, I hope more people start taking their networks seriously and setup some easy bare minimum precautions to help make it at least slightly harder to track you.
With the NSA's whatever the fuck they want budget, nothing's off the table. Dark web, Google, Microsoft, probably whoever will sell it and then they probably slapped them with a gag order If they're an entity likely to publicize it.
My pi holes are set up to pull dot and doh, but they still have to get there traffic from a provider. I should probably funnel that through my VPN but making my DNS unpredictably slow doesn't sound like much fun.
I'm sure ISPs will sell whatever they can see. Smart TV manufacturers use some crazy database to be able to detect what you're watching You know that's going off to everybody that would give them a $20 bill. Then anywhere where you've used the same email to sign up for multiple services all those services will be more than happy to sell their data.
Your bank, LexusNexis with credit data, your school, All the places that your parents and your kids use.
It's not that hard to use a password manager and a catch-all email and start diversifying your user accounts.
Tour and VPN start to degrade your service quality.
Using open source browsers and anonymizing as much as you can is good and yes even DNS over HTTPS plays a role in reduction.
In the end though, I wonder how much it really matters. If they just get one or two chunks out of that list, how much are the rest of it do they get for free or cheap. If you had the eye of sauron on you and they were really trying they would know everything you do.
If the Fed specifically targets you, I imagine eventually they’ll dig up what they need one way or another. (Widespread E2EE should be a barrier of course.)
Given the average person will never be targeted, I think taking the lowest hanging fruit privacy protections is good for a little bit of peace of mind and a little bit of security against data leaks. NSA gets hacked? Maybe when the dump hits blackhat forums or The Pirate Bay it won’t be as obvious how much time you spend on UnixSocks.