Ask HN: What do you personally pay for privacy?
I've been thinking about this heavily lately and it's been killing me because on one hand I see a side of the internet like r/privacy, which both snubs their nose at any advertising and data collecting while also shunning paid E2EE applications. Then on another side, I see people constantly ask for things like E2EE versions of Discord, which obvious won't be feasible until something like MLS is scalable, but I just can't wrap my head around where the middle ground is for users who both desire privacy, and know that that it costs money to develop software that people want to use. It feels like a lot of people on r/privacy want to have their cake and eat it too, and I'm curious what this community things about privacy as a business model. I refuse to believe statements on that sub like "What's wrong with Signal" should be the end of the discussion because there's a whole realm of applications the could benefit from E2EE and decentralization that aren't just generic messengers for 1:1 and small groups.
I pay for kagi.com - privacy and a good search engine ... what a concept tho it's more of a "search aggregator".
I also pay for Proton for mail (anything that requires a credit card or bank account) mostly, tosser e-mails and vpn once in awhile as I have a gmail account strictly for Chrome/YouTube and an old yahoo account of spam control. Other than that it's mostly open source - ZorinOS, Bitwarden, KeePassXC (encrypted vault mode), Ublock Origins, Liberwolf, LiberOffice, etc.
You will never see an encrypted Discord not because it can't be done right this moment but because that is not what the company is doing. I don't think Discord is what you think it is.
As for /Privacy, it's mostly children and idiots flailing in the wind. They want the idea of privacy but not the work or limitations of it. An easy example is how they ban any mention of GrapheneOS or LinageOS both the only sane option to pick for a pixel phone (I run Graphene on my Pixel 8 Pro).
I didn't even know it was THAT bad there. I only skim but that's even worse than I thought. How's your experience with Graphene been?
It's been good but I'm a network eng with experience dating back to pre Free/Net BSD so mileage will probably vary.
Sand-boxing browsers, apps and more importantly hidden telco apps is a bit harder than most pretend but once you get it and how to not need the Play Store it's pretty easy.
I use a Synology NAS which gives me some convenient software nobody is tracking, they have their own suite of tools for productivity and entertainment which has some nice apps for managing things like photo backups and streaming music. Plus via docker you can run many other things on it, like ebooks and movie/tv streaming.
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