I have been reading about internet privacy for a long time. As time went on, I got a vpn subcription, a custom domain, a paid email hosting, etc. No regrets on the services themselves.
I recently had this conversation with a colleague of mine, complaining about the rising cost of everything including internet subscription services: netflix, spotify, youtube, you name it. I could simply disregard my colleague’s complaints as I didn’t have any of those and know the ways of obtaining materials. However, once I start adding up the privacy related services I’m willingly paying instead… they also add up into a considerable amount.
So, do you pay for anything privacy related, how much do you pay in total, and is it affordable for you? For example, many VPN providers offer yearly subscriptions around 40-50 USD.
I pay for Proton, got my Mail Calendar and Drive use cases covered. I pay annually, it’s not a small amount but it’s only once every 2 years (ends up being equivalent to 8 euro a month, 191 euro total).
I use their VPN and SimpleLogin integration. The rest of my use cases are all covered by foss
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- 12€/year for a domain incl. backup mx and sending relay for emails
- 10€/year for encrypted backup
- Energy cost of my NAS (unknown yet)
- 48€/year for a ways service
So just under 6€/month + electricity.
- ~$20/year domain name
- €12/year Tutanota mail
- ~$idk yet/year energy costs of a self-hosted server (an old laptop lying around the house) which handles:
- Backup solution
- File hosting
- Wireguard VPN Tunnel
- Other free and open-source services which allow me to own my data locally.
- Sometimes €5 Mullvad VPN for if I’m traveling internationally. Otherwise Tor or my home VPN would suffice.
Per year, I pay just less than €90. That gets me email, VPN, cloud storage/backup and domains. €7.50pcm is acceptable to me.
I pay 1 euro a month for e-mail that I think is secure enough. I think that’s it at present.
1 euro a month? I’m guessing Posteo, Tutanota, Mailbox.org?
I honestly only pay for Bitwarden. 10€ a year is very very cheap. And you don’t even have to, the free features are all the things you normally need. I am paying just as a donation.
You can also selfhost it and get the premium features for free.
5$ a month for a Hetzner VPS or less than 1$ yearly for Bitwarden?
It’s not like you’d only self host Bitwarden on that server.
Okay correct. Mb. I actually already have a hetzner vps I’m paying for. I might think of self hosting the bitwarden instance there.
Mullvad VPN for 60 euros a year. Totally worth it. Especially traveling and whenever I want anything for “free”
I pay $110 total with $50 going to Proton for email and the other $60 going to kagi.con
@shortwavesurfer @rar any advantage in using kagi instead of various searxNG/whoogle instances that are free to use? Also, brave’s search engine is getting better.
I do like SearxNG and used it, but many public instanxes get rate limited by ddg, google, and several others due to being a proxy fir many more searches than an average user would need. This makes the results from that instance very nearly useless. I am still testing Kagi and added enough for a 2 month subscription after my free trial ends. Since it is paid there are no ads at all, targeted or generalized. Plus they now accept crypto as payment so i can use a burner email and pay without giving up my identity and they are okay with it.
Sadly, no. I used Trocador to do the exchange and set the output address to the address they told me.
@shortwavesurfer unbelievable that some corpos turn to subpar solutions like LN. Many people can’t get that working (re: SethforPrivacy’s recent tweet).
Monero could’ve easily supplanted bitcoin for use in paying kagi, or to ivpn for that matter. Ivpn has recently announced a small-time vpn subscription service, and they also announced they will take LN payments for it. Good luck getting it working.
I know. Its totally nuts. But at least kagi’s excuse is they turn it back into worthless fiat and bitcoin is easier to turn into USD. Bleh. It would be much better if they held onto it. However, accepting crypto is a good first step anyway.
Couple of VPSes and domain names. Maybe 10 euro per month total. That’s like 3 bottles of wine so not a cost I worry about.
Wine for €3/bottle? At that price all I can find is bags!
Bags of wine?
Typical selection at my supermarket.
Do you also buy your milk in bags?
What kind of privacy benefits does renting someone elses computer power have?
All of them?
Like what? It’s not like your are more anonymous for doing that, and you lose complete ownership.
Something that people do is self-host software that respects its user’s privacy more than services some company provides to you for a monthly subscription. For example, you could host your own music streaming software on a server that you rent instead of using Spotify.
But what privacy do you have if you host on someone elses computer? That is what I am asking because I see a lot of people doing VPS but I don’t understand why from a privacy perspective you would do that.
Oh, so you simply don’t see any difference between VPS rented from a reputable company and just storing data in google’s DB. Well, I assure you those are different. VPS provider does not scan all servers, extract all the certificates from them, setup a MITM to intercept decrypt and analyse the incoming traffick, scan all your DBs to extract your emails and than sell all this data to advertisers. But if you believe they do than yes, renting VPS offers no benefits.
I agree.
I feel like certain providers are better than others. It is worth investigating imo.
Some providers use in memory security devices so that if the device was stolen, it would be useless.
Some offer 100% in country services designed to meet in country security & privacy needs , albeit at a higher price.
All privacy and security is a risk / reward scenario. What is the risk of an event, what is the personal reward for mitigating that event, what is the cost to do so.
Personally, I think the most important thing to do is try, and not gatekeep.
A bad actor is a bad actor and no amount of privacy practice is going to stop them.
Also worth asking genuine questions as it’s not like Google is going to roll out step by step avoidance practices to escape the various metadata machines, both theirs and their competitors.
I like privacy based practices because it is form of self reliance, one that requires a community to succeed!
That’s a good question. The hope is that the VPS provider is not reading the disk or sniffing the network traffic and using that information for commercial gains. For example, I could try to find a trustworthy VPS provider with a clear privacy policy for my music streaming server. To the provider, all they ideally see are encrypted bytes over the wire (probably using Wireguard or HTTPS for example).
Spotify, on the other hand, rely on customer usage data for their business. They sell advertising and do things like suggestions based on listening history across many users.
There is no guarantee that using someone else’s computer is 100% private. But it is probably more private than Spotify in this music streaming example.
You’re seriously asking what benefits hosting my own email and cloud has over using ‘free’ services like gmail? Not letting google scan my emails is not a benefit privacy wise?
No I am not, I am asking why you are hosting that on a rented VPS instead of your own server
Because it’s easier, more practical and cheaper.
This is a dead end, I am asking you of privacy benefits of a VPS and you say ”all of them” but you give me none. What’s the point?
@rar I pay for my own domain name + VPS for ~45 USD per quarter. (I know there are cheaper providers, but I am happy with my current one).
I don’t use VPN, I use Tor while browsing and use I2P while torrenting—so I don’t pay a dime to obfuscate my online trails.
I use a free tier from a “privacy-conscious” email provider, so I don’t pay for that either. I don’t self-host my email and I don’t seek die-hard email privacy with mine, currently. At most, I PGP-encrypt some of them.
I self-host my own matrix server, which is an e2ee chatting service. So, that goes into my VPS subscription.
