Under what circumstances would one want to use VPNs or TOR? It seems to me if you are masking your identity you have something to hide, but maybe i'm missing something.
As a rule of thumb, privacy helps protect the weak from the powerful. Perhaps you have nothing to hide, but journalists, activists, celebrities, whistleblowers etc all do, and many of them act as a balancing force in government in your favor. People who need privacy are thrown under the bus if we make privacy synonymous with "suspicious", and systems such as TOR are actually more effective at their job when used by plenty of people like us with nothing to hide. Advocating against privacy in this age is becoming much like advocating for a "papers please" society, because the technology is allowing your "papers" to be automatically checked everywhere you go without you having to be physically stopped and made aware of what's happening. There's also a constant stream of data being hacked - every personal detail of every US employee was recently stolen (i.e. there are no questions you can ask to tell the difference between the real person and the identity thief), nudes, every customer's details and credit card info was taken from Target and Home Depot, etc. So the tighter you are with your details and where they are stored, the better. Hopefully we can transition to not storing so much unnecessary detail about people, for the sake of security. And similiar to protection from power, privacy also offers protection from the online bullies and mobs. Being "doxxed" is what they call having that protection taken away.
I understand the escaping oppressive regimes, but why should I worry about my government spying on me? What is the NSA looking for that I should resort to masking my identity?
why should I worry about my government spying on me
Good question. Why should an honest person care about NSA Surveillance? Watch this:
I agree with this point. I have no worries about my (or other) governments spying at me but there is that uncomfortable feeling of being continuously observed (even when doing everything lawful and moral). In general people don't like to be under continuous surveillance, even if they aren't doing anything false (in moral and jurisdictional context) There's a quite known quote (or motto):
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.
The best use case that everyone could consider righteous is to protect your information while you're connected to wifi that you do not control. If I'm at Starbucks, there is a greater-than-zero chance that someone could be sniffing my traffic. There is a greater-than-zero chance that someone could put up a false hotspot and read all of my traffic, read my passwords, read my email. If I'm on someone else's wifi connection, I fire up my VPN as it encrypts all traffic as it's going through. Another good example is if you're on an Internet connection where your ISP plays with the traffic. For example, if your ISP throttles YouTube videos. Running through a VPN, they would never know what site you're on, so you have free access to information. But really, everyone has something to hide. If you didn't have something to hide, you wouldn't have curtains in your house or locks on your doors. If you don't have something to hide, tell me your bank account login and your social security number. If you don't have anything to hide, take the password off your wifi, your laptop, and your smartphone. Everyone has something they're trying to hide, and it's almost never as malicious as people who say "you're trying to hide something" think it is. More often, it's just embarrassing, not malicious.
Yes, something similar I said in the original post:
If it is OK for you, that your ISP, websites, companies are to 99% (as always, there is no 100% in (IT) security and privacy) blocked from viewing what are you really doing or knowing who you really are (or let's say, see it more or less obfuscated), then it's fine. If you use a VPN to watch geo-restricted content, then it's perfectly fine. If you're using a VPN to do online banking securely from an open hotspot, it's really essential.
The assumption that having something to hide means your doing something wrong isn't accurate anymore. Sure, a lot of shadowy stuff goes on behind VPNs or TOR. On the other hand, people may want to hide searches regarding sexual orientation or fetishes, though all within the bounds of the law. Or, someone may want to hide research for a large purchase from Amazon and Google. There are also lifesaving resources like Erowid that most people probably don't want immediately connected to them. Having something to hide doesn't automatically mean ypunare doing something wrong.
So what I can understand from your comment is that it basically is a matter of right to privacy. It isn't so much about what you are looking at or doing, but that you can do it with anonymity. Am I getting close to the general idea?
Yeah, pretty much spot on. One argument I somewhat like (it's got its flaws of course) is that even if you agree wholeheartedly with the government, you still benefit from the freedom of speech. There is also a bit more conspiracy minded argument that you can never know what the government (or any group with access) might turn your data into or use it for at a later point. Dates can be changed, passwords remembered, and photos smudged to turn a harmless activity into a felony. But like I said, that's a bit far.
Fewer things are approved by governments on a daily basis. With the increasing number of illegal things one can do, you'd do well to rethink your illusion. BTW, how do you know what your government will approve of tomorrow...or even today?
You have nothing to hide until you need to hide something you believe. It's obvious in other countries (Turkey, Iran, so on) that the government is seeking dissidents and locking down Internet to silence the people (so that they can get away with shit). But the USA is also trying this - by the way of various lawsets (SOPA, TPA, PIPA). And when that passes, you'll have plenty to hide - that you watch shows/listen to music not licensed in the US (or without your personal license, like downloading it from a place not authorized by whoever carries the copyright... which could also shut down Netflix). So even if you have nothing to hide /now/, using VPNs or TOR is a way to protest against these things.
Purely out of protest. I'm fortunate enough to have access to all the content I want to watch (that I know about - I'm not saying I know about all the shows and movies out there). But these law projects are, to me, simply disgusting - as, from what I understand, all of the planned laws so far give the tools to ISPs to turn the Internet into a glorified, interactive cable TV ON TOP of giving the intelligence agencies the tools and legal background to watch where you're surfing (and if you're circumventing the blocks put in place).