Who do you trust more, the neighbor who closes their blinds or the neighbor running around house to house trying to look in everyone’s windows?

Some things should be private. Some things should be secret. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, but simply because they’re yours and you want to keep them that way.

Back in the days before cell phones, when landlines were ubiquitous, people in more rural areas had what they called “party lines.” It was a single telephone line shared between multiple houses. You knew which house an incoming call was for based on the ring pattern. Your neighbors could also pick up the receiver, very quietly, and listen in on your phone calls if they wanted too.

Party lines are long gone but Internet communications have their own ways of being “listened in on.” A lot of traffic transmitted over the Internet is encrypted; with TLS for instance. But, some of it isn’t. If you use traditional DNS – UDP over port 53 – everyone in between you and the DNS server can see which websites you’re visiting.

I’m not concerned about my privacy because I have something to hide. I’m concerned about it because my personal business is my business. Not anyone else’s.

It’s completely legal for me to watch 70s pornography while drinking hard liquor and painting pentagrams on my walls and sacrificing small animals to Baal.

I’m not going to videotape it and show my grandmother.

Yes. Personalized pricing relies on harvesting data. Don’t get played. Hackers and scammers rely on getting data on you. Don’t give it to them.

And everyone has something to hide. Do you have cancer? An STD? An affair? Those are all legal, but depending on the circumstances, you might get fucked if the whole town knew. Protect your data.

Of course. Th legal things you do today can be made illegal tomorrow.

“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him.”

It’s not about whether or not you’re doing anything wrong, it’s about how the powers that be can decide at any point that what you’re doing is wrong when it’s convenient to them.

Some non-polotical reasons:

If you live in the US there’s a better chance than not that your ISP is selling your personal data. Outside US idk, maybe still though. Either way you’re putting a lot of trust in a telecom company.

Since net neutrality was removed your traffic can be throttled based on what type of traffic it is, so having it all encrypted for the first hop at least has it treated all the same.

Two political ones I haven’t seen mentioned yet:

You don’t actually know you don’t have anything to hide. Again, assuming US, the amount of federal laws there are couldn’t fit in a pickup truck if they were all printed out. And if someone’s looking to make an example of you then you shouldn’t make it easy for them to find a reason. My favorite example is that throwing out mail that isn’t addressed to you (like junk mail for a previous tenant etc) is a felony.

You also could be falsely accused of a crime. For example, your phone gave out it’s location info near a place where coincidentally an actual crime had taken place. Best to not give that information freely to everyone and have to pony up $10k for a lawyer for nothing.

I don’t know much about computer networks but all I know is when I go to my friend’s house he insists I connect to his Wi-Fi but I use my VPN I don’t know why but I always do because I learned from Reddit and Lemmy & YouTube type people that VPNs are a wise thing to use, and it upsets him I think because he cannot spy on what I’m doing. Because he has mentioned in the past some people who lived in his house he spied on all their internet activity because they were doing bad things. So if he could spy on people’s internet activity when they are connected to his Wi-Fi in his house, he probably could spy on mine too but apparently he couldn’t because I was using a VPN 🤷🏼‍♀️

I don’t do anything nefarious or unethical on the internet, but I’d rather not my boyfriend be spying on everything I do. Just like I wouldn’t want anybody staring at me constantly all day long, that’s creepy. I just use the internet as my leisure time until I fall asleep.

Took me a minute to find it again, but there was an excellent essay answering this question. From https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/ :

There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.

…

On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.

Encrypt your DNS as well, then ISP can’t even see what you’re searching for

https://youtu.be/xAo61IaXun8

While your ISP can’t see everything, they can see metadata. They can see which websites you go to, which social media you use the most, where you bank, where you shop, etc. How much do you think it would take for your ISP to sell that data? If you happen to live somewhere there are laws againat that, you are slightly less at risk. Fines are only a deterrant if they’re more than what’s being offered for your data.

That being said, this only protects you against your ISP or other purely ipaddress based info gatherers. Apps/social media/websites don’t purely use ipaddresses to track you.

The legal thing you’re doing today might not be legal tomorrow – and there’s potential for you having been recorded doing that suddenly illegal thing in the past.

We use VPNs at work a lot for protecting traffic as it passes over the public internet between distant sites. From a security perspective, it’s better not to give devices direct access to the internet if they don’t actually need it. That’s stuff we’re running ourselves though; not a commercial VPN service we’re paying for.

Yes. Absolutely. Privacy is for everyone.

You are assuming that the things legal and illegal today will continue to align with your morality. “I don’t do anything bad” only holds value while you and your governing body share beliefs.

What if tomorrow you disagree? Suddenly there would be a long history of potentially incriminating internet history associated with you. What if it’s for something you can’t even control, such as “using the internet while female” in a society that recently banned women from using the internet?

This level of paranoia shouldn’t be required yet look at the state of the world.

A VPN doesn’t just allow you to change your location. It’s a tunnel between you and someone you trust (a VPN provider). All your traffic shows up as originating from the trusted partners address do that it cannot be traced back to you. They offer this to lots of customers and if your VPN provider is worth their salt, anonymizes these interactions so that they can’t even tell people who did what.