Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship…
Governments use the internet for social control, through both surveillance and censorship. Many countries, such as China, Iran, and even the United States practice active surveillance of the social relationships of everyone. They then sell that data to companies, and then that data gets sold to the US government to work around 4th amendment protections (wired.com/…/odni-commercially-available-informati…)
Internet service providers happily cooperate with government repression, they practice intrusive monitoring of your traffic through deep packet inspection, they track your DNS usage, and they get people thrown in jail, expelled from school, or banned from the internet, sometimes just for ‘copyright infringement’.
Corporations have discovered how to make money from the internet: surveillance. By tracking your online habits, advertising companies build detailed profiles of your individual behavior in order to better sell you junk, Every single major internet ad company now uses behavioral tracking.
Tor isn’t the only way to get around these things, but it is one tool in the arsenal. The fediverse is a step in the right direction, and the fact that I can run my own lemmy is a huge plus, which is what I probably will be doing if lemmy.world continues to block Tor, but that is a selfish solution, and doesn’t help my friend’s in countries with restrictive internet.
I’m not interested in stopping doing stuff on lemmy because the government doesn’t approve of it. Political repression doesn’t mean I should also be profiled or have my speech restricted. I want to be able to help people find abortion support in my state, where it is illegal, and I want to do that without worrying about ending up in some kind of purge list because the GOP becomes full fascist sometime in the next couple years.
twistypencil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
On mobile, so have to be short: I don’t want to leak my IP to every random site that hosts am image and shows up in my feed. I use tor for everything, and turning it off to browse lemmy.world is pointless.
Tor is useful for more than just getting around your work firewall.
Look into tor browser, tracking cookies is only the beginning.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Again, what are you actually protecting yourself on by preventing random sites from seeing your IP?
Information your IP conveys:
So unless you have a very non-standard internet set up, it basically lets me know you are in Faketown, New Jersey. Which is not particularly useful information. And likely has already been conveyed to anyone you care about because of the tracking cookie for said Dominos.
The reason why this CAN be an issue and you see streamers block their IPs: DDOS attacks exist. But if you are going to websites that are likely to DDOS the visitors for poops and giggles… maybe consider going to different sites? Or, yeah, that is a use case for tor.
But the idea of putting ALL traffic through tor (just like ALL traffic through a vpn) just… mostly defeats the purpose of it because you are still making a nice and easily tracked “profile”. And it is very clear that site admins can detect what is tor so that they don’t assume you are regularly traveling between Faketown and Luxemburg or whtaever.
twistypencil@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Sorry, I cannot possibly match your asymmetric post length in my replies. I’ll simply leave it at: I want to use Tor, for a lot of different reasons, not all of them are you going to eventually uncover with your argumentation, because I don’t plan on talking about them, not because they are illegal. If you don’t want to use it, then fine, its not for you.
I do not agree with you that using tor actually compromises you, but if you do, then go ahead and keep believing that. Seemed to work fairly well for Snowden, and quite a lot of others who depend on it daily.
Puzzle_Sluts_4Ever@lemmy.world 1 year ago
You have yet to refute a single point and the extent of your argument is “I want it”.
Also, Snowden, really? The guy who got caught and had the Espionage Act thrown at him, fled to Russia, and now lives there until the end of his days? Putting his shit posting and memes through tor isn’t protecting him. Him being more useful to Russia as a political pawn than as currency to give to the US government is what keeps him safe.
But, and I realize this might be hard for you to understand: Tor is incredibly useful for some activities (I even said I suggest it to others in the comments you refuse to read). But the more you do through Tor as “you”, the more of a profile there is which lets anyone who actually cares about you track you down.
Need to blow a whistle: Tor can be a good tool for that. But only if you are doing it from an identity that has never been linked to any of your personal identities AND the data doesn’t contain anything that is identifiable either (that last bit being Snowden’s problem, if I remember correctly).