Topic: Is there too much competition between cloud services and vpns now (Read 79 times)

Tor/onion routing integrated into Firefox would be great (even if you could just securely connect to dot onion sites via Firefox).


It can't be shutdown now but it could be heavily controlled to an extent where it might be.

There's often going to be lingering software vulnerabilities that could be exploited by anyone wanting to kill your privacy as well as things like the repositories for tornado cash being closed and wiped a few months ago in the news (there's likely backups but it might be hard to work out how trustworthy they are - especially if lots of maintainers use remote management systems for storing and accessing their code thst are all hosted by companies one government can control).


Even if they don't, someone else could likely sell your data. People's behaviour patterns likely aren't hard to predict and spot, if you go from.not using a vpn to using one, you can't expect to be well hidden and may take more risks as a result.

I'd trust a free vpn as much as I'd trust a paid one though (paid services will just have highe rprofit margins when they sell your data).


There's probably going to be little in the way of ads when they get rid of that sort of thing. They'll probably do like a lot of companies seem to and tell you they're updating their privacy policy, give you a few weeks for it to come into effect and you to get annoying of hitting "remind me later" and then they'll get a lot of data to sell. It's also not like you'll spend $1500 on a phone only to decide your privacy is worth more and buy something else - I expected them to pull their privacy thing long before this time though.

Competition is great but in this case you really need to watch out for how some of these services can be so cheap or even free. Just like with free e-mail and free cat videos, most likely you're being sold in exchange for the "free" VPN.

And of course any "privacy" from a massive corporation like Apple is bullshit. It works only until you actually need it. They'll sell you out as soon as it becomes profitable for them to do so.


There is Firefox with Tor built in. It's called Tor Browser.

I hope that p2p solutions start becoming more mainstream. If Firefox had TOR built into it, that would be pretty sweet. Of course there will always be pushback from those who want to destroy privacy, maybe more than actually want to see decentralized solutions, but so long as open source software is a thing and developers have the capability of being anonymous, there is hope for the future.

I've noticed there are so many technology firms trying to make the bulk of their profits from selling privacy or infrastructure solutions (like cloud services) and with other companies like antivirus (cheaply enough that they started to offer VPNs for free) and Web browsers moving into the space too in recent years, are we going to see there being too much competition soon and perhaps peer to peer solutions taking over at some point once tracking improves for services like recaptcha.

This became more noticeable to me recently as duckduckgo have started a marketing campaign aimed at privacy and Apple have been trying to do similar for a while too with their OS/device ads.

We're likely quite a bit of time away from getting a fully decentralised and stable storage solution (even though there's competition for it) and website throughput (as tor seems to work fairly well for addressing but it's also prone to being attacked in ways such as dos/spam attacks to take parts of the n network down and won't boost the power of the servers hosting onion domains). It's well known Amazon and Microsoft make a bulk of their profits from cloud services.

This probably means things like web3 and whatever the metaverse gets reinvented to in a few years is probably going to either directly compete with a lot of large companies already in this sector or will be directly boosting their profits (or - and most likely - both).