Do you regularly pay for any privacy-enhancing tools?

NatureFriends:

So I’m asking you whether you believe paying for ensuring privacy is a good thing (especially if you’re paying smaller companies with good ethics) or if you believe we should all have a right to privacy for free?

These are great questions but quite complex to answer. You shouldn’t have to pay for privacy but it’s the model we have since the dawn of the internet. Nothing is free. You pay for it with your data soul or you pay in cold hard money.

What you can’t expect is organisations that employ devs, their expertise and their time to do this for free. Thats simply not how it works. They provide a solution to a problem. It costs money - whether that’s one-off fees, subscriptions or donations. I don’t go to work for free, so why should others?

In an ideal world, by design, everything would be focussed on privacy. We don’t live in an ideal world - far from it. Arguably, taking privacy ethics aside, the likes of Google/Alphabet and Meta have done ‘good’ by employing so many people and contributing to the economy. They offer many services seemingly for “ free ” because the people are the product. The likes of Proton (as one example) simply can’t do that.

The two models are entirely different. So: yes. This is also why I voluntarily donate to Signal. Because, if I don’t, I run the risk of it no longer being viable to use later on.

Will the governments around the world subsidise and contribute to privacy-focussed functions including e2ee and heavily regulate cryptocurrencies? Absolutely not. For obvious reasons that they’re all fighting to end e2ee and watch your financials so they can control you even more. Some countries are trying to get rid of cash, so no wonder they don’t like Monero.

I’m happy to pay which, in turn, allows some organisations to provide free limited functions to those who can’t afford it so at least they can have some privacy. And this is where it becomes rather complex as we enter socioeconomics which is an entirely different conversation…