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Premium Privacy Services: are they really that private ? (lemmy.world)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
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I’m going to do my best to word this question carefully. I’m not privacy expert and maybe no more than an idiot. I do want to protect myself online.

Which led me to privacy focused cloud based premium solutions. The idea is you can pay for a service so they don’t need to serve ads and scan your data for profit. Services like Kagi , Proton among others offer services for a fee. These services let you pay with a credit card .

My question is , are these services really that private if they have your payment information ? Does it really make sense to pay to not be tracked but still have your information on file and linked to you ?

Is this more of an argument of privacy vs anonymity? Am I looking at this wrong ?

I understand the ultimate privacy is self hosted but for some things like search that limits options. I understand there is crypto for some of these options. But bitcoin isn’t cheap.

Curious to get others thoughts on this ? Please be respectful i am trying to learn…

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[–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

Anything you pay for will only be as anonymous as the payment method you use, things like bitcoin are not really anonymous since buying bitcoin without know your customer regulations is hard. If your adversary has the resources or your threat model is high enough even paying by mailing cash proposes a risk which is why things like tor need to be free. My advice is get a password manager and create unique long passwords and never reuse usernames to prevent doxxing threats, I use keepassXc for everything even my bank.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    While this is certainly true, I'd like to highlight the difference between privacy and anonymity. Kagi is worse because they require payment information (though there is an option which attempts to separate your payment from your searches), but they are better because their privacy policy is better. If you don't trust the service itself, whether because of its location or any other reason, then you need to be paying in cash or monero, using free services. In both of those cases though, you also need to ensure you don't deanonymize yourself in other ways. In other words, pay if you don't want to think about too much, and you more or less trust the company.

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