VPNs haven't been useful since 2002

[VulcanWerks]

I saw that video earlier and found it "too depressing" to share...  on it's own... I'm glad you found a use for it!

I no longer care to even debate with the "who cares? whatever" crowd.  I figure, "Well, you were told." and leave it there.

I see your point.

I don’t debate it either.

But, I think it’s more due to my own realization. Do I love it? Not really. I’m also a cynic/realist/some adjective who sees that “privacy” died a long long time ago.

Even if they didn’t scrape my data, they know what my license plate is. So they know where I live. They know when I bought my house and how. They know where I work. They know what other cars I own. They know my SSN, can access bank records, brokerage statements and tie basically anything financially to me directly for the last many years.

None of that needed to be scraped from encrypted transmissions. With all of the information I listed you could easily build on that and paint a pretty detailed and complete picture of someone’s life. That’s before “club cards” at the grocery store, memberships, etc.

What the tech side of it gives is real-time intelligence and the ability to source insane amounts of data that could be used for so many purposes at scale - massive sample sets taken collectively.

We haven’t touched on satellite capability or good old fashioned tiny cameras or microphones. “Combat Zones that See” is an example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Zones_That_See

TLDR: Privacy died a long time ago as it pertains to you and the government. If they want to figure something out about you, they will. Will that’s not joyous to me, it does leave me realizing my measures are really to combat the common cyber criminal - not to create *absolute* privacy.