Ask HN: Since CitizenFour, have you changed the way you conduct yourself online?

There are two types of security, Mossad and non-Mossad. Risk wise the latter is more important for average users and the former is unwinnable without unjustifiable difficulty.

My take on this problem is that most people here do in fact value their privacy and the fight for privacy. That's why Snowden articles rampaged this site for so long. However, the divide comes when the decision to actually change behavior arises.

We know what we can do for better online privacy:

   - Use tor for all internet activity
   - Pay cash for everything; do not own any credit cards,
     or use a service like Blur
   - Bank only with banks that don't share our data
   - Don't use a modern smartphone
   - Use PGP for all email

The list goes on and on, but who here does any of these things? Who wants to sacrifice the convenience of paying with a credit card online and managing their banking with Mint? The threat of privacy violations is not real to many people right now. They either can't or don't extrapolate the ramifications of losing their privacy in the future, or don't weigh the imposing risk as high enough to alter behavior.

Have I changed the way I conduct myself online? Absolutely. I do four of the five things I listed above but I could never imagine a small percentage, let alone a vast majority of people implementing them in their day to day lives. That's the core of the problem that we need to solve first.

Interesting theme on despair. I think it goes a little deeper - perhaps people feel disenfranchised by establishment politics as well. It gets worse if you assume Teleco A-Z are always watching; you could go the Tor route or GPG or Wickr or Telegram - but ultimately the level of espionage being carried out and for so long makes you wonder if any of the privacy solutions are for real. Sounds a bit paranoid but as we've seen the onion peeled back by Snowden it is quite clear.

I can imagine some will feel censored to a degree. There is some stigma to knowing about privacy and technology. Try talking to a lamen even casually and you might as well be wearing a tin foil hat. Even @moxie's recent thread on HN echoes that.

I changed some stuff, but it was when the reports came, not because of the movie.

My changes:

- Don't use gmail for private email. Self hosted it instead.

- Switched to Firefox (from Chrome), changed my addons (https everywhere, privacy badger and mublock).

- Deleted my facebook account.

- Tried to get my friends to use a self-hosted irc server + mumble instead of skype - but that didn't last for long sadly.

- Changed from google to duckduckgo, but I'm constantly using the !g command anyway.

Sigh. I don't think any of this matters much anyway.