Sure, i’m more paranoid but I don’t believe anyone with a head on their shoulders would say privacy on the internet has ever gotten better.

I mean things are dire but it’s not as if nothing has improved. Even just 10-15 years ago most websites weren’t using any encryption (or if they did it was only for login pages). Anything you read or sent could be seen by your ISP or someone snooping on the network. Encrypted messaging basically didn’t exist or was very niche. VPNs weren’t nearly as widespread either. Go back another decade and Tor Browser didn’t yet exist (publicly) so there was no easy way to hide your location or stay anonymous online. Governments and companies have clamped down, yes, but our arsenal of privacy tools has never been bigger.

The amount of metadata accessible when visiting a website is crazy nowadays. They can track things people never even imagined, like the arc of how your hand moves across the screen with a mouse, the cadence of how you type, and then tie those to profiles with any other details they have managed to scrape

You can block a lot of this dynamic tracking with NoScript. This will break some websites but it’s worth the inconvenience of a messed up page or needing to find an alternate site

Gone back to paying for nearly everything in cash (good for budgeting I find too, can’t make impulse purchases if I only have enough money to buy what I came to the shops for). I also got a couple more friends to switch to Signal and make some other privacy-related changes. Slowly getting there

Tutamail is the only service I know of that still doesn’t need anything but I don’t expect it to last. Email providers that don’t make you verify anything end up being used for spam and then websites just start blocking their domain from being used for account creation

It’s just a bullshit game of political pride at this point. Anti-privacy pundits criticised the UK gov for “caving to the US” after they dropped the previous order so now they’re doubling down on trying to take away their citizens privacy in the name of standing up to the US. How brave. Not that the US gov gives a shit about privacy either

Friendly reminder police in the US are legally allowed to steal money and possessions from you

This is the real problem. As more and more countries push for laws like this I think sites will just adopt blanket age-verification for simplicity’s sake instead of having to constantly keep track of which countries/states in countries require it