Do encrypted services actually offer a meaningful privacy boost?

> Network-wide VPNs: Encrypting every single IoT device in your home. Some routers allow you to set a network wide VPN. This mostly works fine. Not everyone necessarily needs a VPN. In the US we tend to have ISP that sell data with no opt out, so network wide can be nice to have in that case. For hiding personal browsing data you obviously don’t need network wide. > Custom ROMs: Running GrapheneOS or similar on all mobile devices. Not necessarily hard, you just buy a device supports graphene (or next year you can buy one preinstalled through motorolla), but I’d recommend iphone to most people. It asks the least of them. > Search Neutrality: Hard-blocking Google and other data-heavy search engines. There’s also startpage and SearXNG. > Air-gapping Vehicles: Never syncing a phone to a car’s infotainment system. become a peasant and ride the bus with me, but yeah you should trust the device you you connect via usb and send data to > Financial Privacy: Preventing banks or utility providers from sending digital footprints via email. I guess tuta/proton were worth it after all > Closed Ecosystems: Only communicating with other encrypted-mail users. even better, don’t talk to anyone and go hang out in the woods with some squirrels and deer. they will not leak any info. otherwise just be mindful of what you put in emails. > I’m struggling to see the “value add” of paid services like Proton or Tuta when I feel I can achieve 90% of my privacy goals for free. They do have good free tiers that give you the full security and encryption benefits. If you want full features + encrypted email message bodies or local storage you can potentially do that through thunderbird or extensions for free or with a low cost (eg mailbox.org $12 per year) provider. A provider like yahoo or gmail will harvest metadata. However you could still do pop3 + pgp or store on encrypted hard drive if money is limited and you aren’t satisfied with proton or tuta apps. I think free proton is pretty good though and can be combined with duck aliasing.