But if you use a VPN regularly, like always, suddenly seeing a different type of traffic would look weird

VPNs are commonly used by all kinds of people for mundane things. any kind of darknet kind of stuff is often associated with illegal activity and will be seen as suspicious by your internet provider

again, it can’t just be any VPN, Proton, Mullvad, Nym…and maybe iVPN if you don’t care about the number of locations you can connect through.

you also want to have a few other things open. Anything that makes additional noise in the connection. Even if you use Mullvad’s Daita feature, it’s good to have some extra noise being made while darknet-stuff is being used

oh…I skipped over the primary purpose. If they give you the third degree about using a VPN just say that you use it to keep yourself safe from crazy people online. You can’t play that plausible deniability card with things like snowflake and Tor, but you can with a VPN that’s available to average consumers

it would prevent your internet provider from seeing the activity of other people connecting through your PC

never do it without a VPN, a good one that has a long, proven track record of recording nothing

you can use those websites to find out who needs to be contacted.

I really hope motorolla just does a regular unaltered Graphene OS and not some skinned version of it

I use Ageis auth for my proton account’s 2FA token and ente auth for all my other 2FA tokens

I don’t use google photos or nextcloud, I use ente photos.

I don’t use opera or librewolf, I use brave, tor and mullvad browser sometimes when I use mullvadVPN

First I’m hearing about app lounge, I was already using f-droid for some things

You got container tabs to consistently work? Every time I use them they get reset to the default 4. Right now I’m using brave with multiple profiles. I block all of youtube’s ads out of spite now

What the fuck, how is this the first time I’m hearing about this…

Because the media is evil and none of that bullshit is about protecting kids, they just want us to dox ourselves so we’re afraid to criticize anything

so compartmentalize it for just watching youtube. make a new profile on your privacy-friendly web browser just for that, load that profile up with all the annoyance blocking things you need and leave the main daily-driver profile free from google.

and don’t use any of google’s services on mobile if you can

a few months ago, youtube implemented AI-based age assurance where to prove you’re an adult if the AI thought you were underage, you could either

1. dox yourself by uploading an ID that they absolutely WILL keep on file forever and will inevitably leak when they get hacked in the future
2. add a credit card to your account so they can trick you into paying for youtube premium when you accidentally click on something in the future or 3. if your account is old enough and has gotten continuous consistent use then they’ll just go with that

The media is evil and didn’t give the story any attention

old google accounts that have been regularly used for their entire existence are whitelisted by youtube’s age assurance, because if the google account is beyond like…10 years old and has been getting continuous use the entire time then there’s no way it belongs to a kid anymore

that’s why I kind of regret deleting my older Gmail addresses, the one I use to watch youtube is still pretty old over 15 years. but I had one google account that would be 19 years old by now