I have posted here a few times after initially discovering this community on Reddit and I’m a relative beginner to the world of privacy.
I read about privacy every day and the importance of fighting for our right to privacy and use stay away from the established social media platforms and use tools/apps like Signal and Ente and use LibreWolf/Tor/Brave for browsers and Proton Mail (free) for email and pay for a VPN.
But I’ve also seen many of these services offering paid tiers with more storage, aliases and a variety of other benefits.
I’m considering some paid plans for email and storage services and they do seem [ratty reasonably priced, but they’re also more subscriptions in a world full of subscriptions.
So I’m asking you whether you believe paying for ensuring privacy is a good thing (especially if you’re paying smaller companies with good ethics) or if you believe we should all have a right to privacy for free?
“Right to privacy for free” and “right to have others run a private service free for you at their own cost and detriment” are not the same thing.
This isn’t “paying for ensuring privacy,” it’s paying for an online service that requires money and other resources to sustain itself. Some services have you “pay” by selling your usage data to shady advertisement agencies. A service that respects your privacy doesn’t have that option, so you might instead pay with your own money directly.
Sure. But only on a need to basis. The economy is not there for me to throw token gestures, also I have the privilege of not having a severe threat model so I get by with most free offerings. So to enumerate what I currently pay for:
VPN. Free doesn’t cut it, whether it’s lack of control over features / servers or small data caps.
Storage. Need quick ways to pool resources with family so it’s worth it.
Note taking. This one is a bit of a luxury I have to admit. But free options are very limiting.
That’s it, aliases and email, among other things I manage within free tiers.
That’s why I included in a parenthetical at the end of my post about supporting smaller companies with good ethics. If it’s for a good cause and helps hardworking people who don’t harvest your data, then it sounds good.
However, another part of it for me is that what if in the long run companies like this that I’m financially supporting now one day become a Google or Microsoft-sized corporation, or what if these big corporations take notice of these smaller companies promoting right to privacy and try to take them down if they become too big, with large user bases? Proton already has allegedly around 100 million users and where are they in 5-10 years?
But if we’re talking about right now, I’m asking this question because I feel good about helping these smaller, emerging companies championing the right to privacy.
I wish we would live in a world where the right to privacy wouldn’t cost you any money. But the world evolved into the state of ad-supported services, user profiling and survelliance, where pricacy-focused services - if actually acting accordingly to it - won’t have a chance if their services are not paid for, and that’s what i think more people need to understand. They can’t rely on unreliable income like donations or grants.
Especially for services i use everyday, like my search engine (Kagi), my email (Tuta), my cloud storage plus encryption software (Filen and Cryptomator) and email aliases (addy), i want to ensure that they can keep pursuing their goal while i get a good product that isn’t interested in me as another way to profit.
The only downside of this approach is for people with low income or who are fed up of subscriptions. That’s where i wish we would have a base level access to privacy-focused services and gladly some provide that.
Regarding the hypothetical about Proton: Nothing stops a company from going downhill unfortunately. Proton can turn into Google or Microsoft at any point of the time. That’s where you have to think if you give this company enough trust that they won’t do that.
The fact remains that nothing is free, even self-hosting from your home (as opposed to renting a VPS) has an upfront cost (hardware) and ongoing cost (electricity) not counting your personal time as a cost. Such is life and the world we live in. You can call food a human right like privacy, but food still costs money because the labour to produce and deliver it must be compensated.
I’m much more comfortable paying for a service with money than with my data, be it self-hosted or not.
We have the right to privacy for free, but the system has been built to take it from us for profit. So now we DO need to pay for something, especially if we want the tools we rely on to stick around long term.
I personally pay for password/alias management. VPN and storage. But I also use a ton of free tools that I am very grateful for
I paid for domain name, alias service, password manager, vpn. Ideally I’d want to pay for more service but living in 3rd world country with 3rd world wages made too many 1st world rate subscription aren’t sustainable for myself so i just limit myself to that 5. Occasionally i donate some small amounts to signal, eff etc but its rare.
I do pay for a Proton Family subscription and I’m quite happy with it. It’s fairly priced for what it is and provides good value to me.
Not necessarily, if you want to support these companies or projects then sure, but a lot of people will be ok with using free alternatives.
Companies should respect our privacy by default without us having to pay any extra money, that’s for sure. I don’t expect privacy-first companies (Mullvad, Proton, Mozilla…) to provide products and services free of charge.
Subscribe to the thing you actually need, is within your budget, and that provides an ongoing service. You can pay for one year and cancel if you don’t want reocurring subscriptions.
This seems easy enough to me. It’s no different than paying for anything else. I don’t subscribe to services I won’t use or that are outside my budget, but this is specific to my needs and income. Other people should act according to theirs.
I also wouldn’t necessarily stick to free tier if it’s sufficient, in the same way I wouldn’t go to a grocery store to eat the free samples while planning to leave without buying anything.
Even if they are a nonprofit who say the samples are there as a service to the community (like Proton), you want there to continue to be not only samples there but also a store in general. We established it’s a needed service, after all.
If I suddenly got a lot more money then I would subscribe to a lot more than I do now, but as things are I am thankful for the free tiers.
I pay for Tuta Mail and pCloud for storage. I’m also currently paying Forward Email to be able to send out a newsletter for my blog from my domain name. I also pay for Uruky search engine atm, because I like their attitude and because they are a small team trying to set something up for privacy. I host Nextcloud myself, and that saves a lot of money on tools I use. I pay for Standard Notes too, and Mullvad VPN.
It sounds like a lot, but these are small amounts per year.
I love paying for privacy services. Even if there’s a free plan with all the features I need I often go out of my way to pay for a higher tier to support the business (assuming it’s relatively inexpensive to do so).
I can’t imagine enjoying a relatively unique service ideologically aligned with me on a topic I care about and being unwilling to pay for it.
If you consider a dedicated server where I self-host, administrate, and maintain all of my own services as regularly paying (using cryptocurrencies) for a privacy-enhancing tool, than yes, otherwise no.
My true answer to the thread title is that I can only shamefully admit I have a NordVPN subscription that expires this year. I am considering moving to Mullvad, as the pricing is very reasonable.
I managed to get a simple home LAN server set up too. It has vaultwarden, searxng, syncthing, and some other stuff running in containers. I’m hoping the electricity cost here is minimal.
Email and VPN are the ones I can’t home host for obvious reasons. I’m considering going with posteo for email, but proton free is better in some ways like security. Duckduckgo aliases have been good enough that I wouldn’t want to migrate away from them either.
Therefore NordVPN is the only subscription I actually have, but I sank some time and money into realizing the home server.
These are great questions but quite complex to answer. You shouldn’t have to pay for privacy but it’s the model we have since the dawn of the internet. Nothing is free. You pay for it with your data soul or you pay in cold hard money.
What you can’t expect is organisations that employ devs, their expertise and their time to do this for free. Thats simply not how it works. They provide a solution to a problem. It costs money - whether that’s one-off fees, subscriptions or donations. I don’t go to work for free, so why should others?
In an ideal world, by design, everything would be focussed on privacy. We don’t live in an ideal world - far from it. Arguably, taking privacy ethics aside, the likes of Google/Alphabet and Meta have done ‘good’ by employing so many people and contributing to the economy. They offer many services seemingly for “free” because the people are the product. The likes of Proton (as one example) simply can’t do that.
The two models are entirely different. So: yes. This is also why I voluntarily donate to Signal. Because, if I don’t, I run the risk of it no longer being viable to use later on.
Will the governments around the world subsidise and contribute to privacy-focussed functions including e2ee and heavily regulate cryptocurrencies? Absolutely not. For obvious reasons that they’re all fighting to end e2ee and watch your financials so they can control you even more. Some countries are trying to get rid of cash, so no wonder they don’t like Monero.
I’m happy to pay which, in turn, allows some organisations to provide free limited functions to those who can’t afford it so at least they can have some privacy. And this is where it becomes rather complex as we enter socioeconomics which is an entirely different conversation…
I agree with this comment. I’d like to add the following: there are VPN services that offer 2-year plans at a very steep discount off the original price, which suggests that this isn’t the best deal and is a sign that they’ve got you hooked. “Got you hooked” means → you’re an easy target.
Mullvad VPN, for example, has a more reasonable and fair price; you pay for what you need.
I agree with this comment. I’d like to add the following: there are VPN services that offer 2-year plans at a very steep discount off the original price, which suggests that this isn’t the best deal and is a sign that they’ve got you hooked. “Got you hooked” means → you’re an easy target.
Mullvad VPN, for example, has a more reasonable and fair price; you pay for what you need.
This is an underrated aspect with many services. Trying to optimize sales for everything takes up a lot of mental bandwidth. That can lead to mistakes like forgetting to unsub or to decisions like staying subbed only because you weren’t in place to make a fair comparison to other services during your renewal month. Much may have changed a lot after a multi year sub.
It also leads to a mindset where you are trying to extract as much value as possible, which isn’t the same as making the best overall choices for oneself or the world. The mindset makes it a lot easier for amazon, walmart, nordvpn, etc to manipulate you though.
Even Proton does some of the questionable tactics, with their big sales for new users only who will pay full price once they have had enough time to migrate everything over.
In case of forgetfulness or excessive mental effort, there are personal notes on physical paper, not digital. It’s more productive, accessible, and unencrypted (unless you have your own mental encryption codes that are unreadable to others based on your handwriting).
That’s why the phrase “consume, consume, obey” exists—to broaden access (reach) to as many people as possible worldwide. Sometimes it’s better to buy directly from the supplier rather than from third parties, but that’s not always the case.
Proton AG is already inconsistent on its own. I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of this company.