[mvieira38]

> And most of the steps people do to mitigate privacy violations (TOR, pihole, VPNs, etc.) probably make any signal you do put out more scrutinized.

If you're using them correctly there is no way to scrutinize your traffic more, these comments just spread FUD for no good reason. How are "they" unable to catch darkweb criminals for years and even decades, but somehow can tell if it's me browsing reddit over Tor?

[ragequittah]

My take: if you do it correctly you're a very small minority of people and most would probably be concerned at your level of paranoia if you told them every detail of your setup. Turns out opsec is pretty difficult to achieve. Also unless you're a criminal you're probably wasting a lot of time for no real gain.

I use a pihole, ublock, a vpn for some devices, and I'm using my own OPNSense router w/ very strict settings. The amount of privacy I think I have from all that is next to nothing if someone were actually interested in what I was doing. I'd probably just get one of my boxes shelled and that's the end of that. Mostly what I'm trying to do is block 1) Some for the lulz Russian teenager 2) the shady ad networks hoovering up everything all the time and 3) my IoT devices like TVs and Hue light bulbs from ever accessing any part of the rest of my network.

You'll also notice that darkweb criminals are getting caught more and more frequently these days because governments have decided to no longer tolerate it. I feel bad for you if you're in a ransomware gang these days.

[mvieira38]

And if you do follow these arrests you'll notice that it's old-fashioned investigations that catch them, by tracing behavior, log in times, etc. The comment I was answering was implying you lose anonymity by using these tools, which you don't

[alganet]

There are two distinct concerns here.

One of them is personal privacy. For example, an activist being individually targeted.

The other is behavioral targeting, which has no business in catching criminals. It wants to know how large flocks of people behave online.