zlacker

>>syness+(OP)
Very good, but it's funny how on the "why IPVanish" page he links to, the first reason given for using a VPN is, to watch Netflix from any location! Oh the horror of limited localised Netflix content. We must protect ourselves. (Really it is awful, I use a VPN for that purpose too). But the point is, it doesn't seem popular to hide metadata from ISPs with VPNs. Will it ever be popular? I'm not so sure. For good or bad, I'm suggesting most people don't care that their IPs are recorded. Email content is not seen, nor what I type into this comment form.

Also, when I send an email to my friend "laserpants@something.com", sure the data captures the send-to email address. But the data doesn't know who laserpants actually is, nor does the email content get saved. I'm not saying laserpants can't be found if the law decides to investigate, but I doubt it's a matter of pressing a button to bring up the real name of laserpants. Especially if laserpants uses different email addresses and a shared internet.

>>exodus+a7
But the problem is, it IS easy. Even anonymized at assets are de-anonymized trivially,using secondary datasets. You can uniquely identify more than 87% of the US population with gender, birthday, and zip code. For more than 50%, you can use the municipality name instead of zip.

If your friend uses a separate, privately maintained email address for everyone and every service, that will help a lot. Then we only know his identity because email is sent in the clear, even between his own server and home computer. Of course, everyone uses separate email addresses for everyone, right?