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comment by TheCookieMonster
TheCookieMonster  ·  3432 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: VPN - To use or not to use, that's the question

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.