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…

  • bad_news@lemmy.billiam.net
    2·
    17 hours ago

    I think the primary use of a paid Proton or similar situation is to deprive the advertising panopticon of that data, not the state beyond the point of even an executive warrant, much less judicial. Your confirmation email from your dentist inherently deanonymizes the recipient as you, so you wouldn’t want that to go somewhere anonymous, but you also probably don’t want to feed the ad data beast by sending that to Google. It’s no protection against the state, but the state can probably lean on your dentist if they care too much about when that appointment is, but using a Proton Mail combined with their aliases can deprive the private data brokers (who are the main source for low level ambient government surveillance) of a lot of information about you.