Europe And Companies implement more policies to track you - Here how's to make it hell for them

With the European Union (EU) still attempting to push the chat control mandate to pass, privacy for European citizens has never been harder. I attempted to compile some software, services and payment methods to make it harder for the spying eyes of pretty much every government and company to trace purchases back to the consumer.

As an average consumer you can do something against it! For obscuring your purchases (AMLD5 hates me lol) you can purchase anonymity coins on exchanges like dfx.swiss (does require KYC) or mtpelerin.com (non-KYC) and move them freely (unless you use exodus).

Of course no matter of privacy solution is going to keep your op-sec up if you go around telling everyone your first and last name

The list below contains privacy solutions i have used before (and verified the functionality of):

VPN's / Proxies

Mullvad VPN (Sweden)

Positives

[+] Field tested no-log privacy claims (Mullvad on April 18th of 2023 was subject to a search warrant issued by Swedish authorities at the request of German authorities)

[+] TOR Mirror

[+] Accepts Payments in crypto

[+] Based in a country with strong privacy laws

Negatives

[-] Always flagged as a VPN

NordVPN

Positives

[+] Cheap on a two year plan (2.14€|MO / 51.36 / 2yr)

Negatives

[-] Removing uncomfortable parts from the TOS with limited notice.

• Regarding that, they changed their "Law enforcement Collaboration" clause from "NordVPN operates under the jurisdiction of Panama and will not comply with requests from foreign governments and law enforcement agencies." to "NordVPN operates under the jurisdiction of Panama and will only comply with requests from foreign governments and law enforcement agencies if these requests are delivered according to laws and regulations"
  Yes. this matters.

[-] Affiliate advertising

[-] Questionable advertising (Promising protection from 'Hackers' and 'Military grade encryption which is just a selling point for AES256. Basic standard in the VPN industry. By their logic we also use military grade encryption with the HTTPS protocol.)

[-] Requires Credit/Debit Cards for purchase

[-] Self-Dox worth of information to buy a tool promising privacy.

[-] Questionable quality of audits.

TOR

Positives

[+] Multi-hop by design

[+] Both public endpoints (Relays) and non-public end-points (bridges)

[+] Open Source (GitHub)

Negatives

[-] Subject to traffic correlation attacks

Communication platforms

Discord

Positives

[+] Large user base

[+] Easy to use interface

[+] Encrypted Voice-Chats

Negatives

[-] Founded by Jason Citron, previously known for OpenFeint who faced a class action lawsuit for privacy breach.

[-] Submitted an IPO and is therefore soon to be a publicly traded company with more interest in investors than user feedback.

[-] Questionable changes

[-] Questionable moderation

[-] All your text messages are stored in plain text

[-] Target of most malware

[-] Trivial account protection

[-] Horrendous AI Support

[-] Entirely funded by Investors and subscriptions.

[-] American company (Patriot act)

[-] Will literally fold without any legal pressure.

Signal

Positives

[+] End-To-End encrypted

[+] Field-tested privacy claims

[+] Anti-censorship circumvention

[+] Open-Source client-side code

[+] Entirely funded by donations (Also available in crypto)

[+] Release by authors of the signal protocol

[+] Simple to use interface

Negatives

[-] Requires a phone number to sign up

[-] Region locked in certain countries

Telegram

Positives

[+] Simple to use interface

Negatives

[-] Requires a phone number to sign up

[-] Full of spam bots

[-] Registration is not possible in certain countries

[-] A lot of illegal content with seemingly little to no reaction from Telegram moderation

[-] Not end-to-end encrypted by default (except for secret chats)

[-] Entirely funded by subscriptions, username sales, stars and NFT's

Payment methods

Debit/Credit card (except for prepaid)

Positives

[+] Convenient

[+] Widely accepted

Negatives

[-] Inherently KYC

[-] Anonymity with them is not a thing.

[-] Every transaction is visible both to your bank and government

[-] First thing to get seized in case of a warrant.

[-] Every single transaction leads back to you.

[-] Serialized

Physical Cash

Positives

[+] Anonymous

[+] Mostly untraceable (Although serialized)

[+] After cash enters the system it cannot easily be tracked

[+] Widely accepted

[+] No KYC

[+] Easy local movement

Negatives

[-] Moving large sums of cash across borders is illegal (Although, sending large sums with a bank transfer is not illegal even cross-border, ironic.)

[-] Illegal to be paid "In cash" by an employer (Anti-tax-evasion and Money Laundering Laws.)

[-] Not exactly convenient

[-] Somewhat fragile

PayPal

Positives

[+] Quick and easy checkout

[+] BNPL (Buy now, pay later)

[+] Installments as a function

[+] Widely accepted

Negatives

[-] Tend to randomly block and shut down accounts.

[-] Requires pretty much a self-dox worth of information.

[-] American Company. (Subject to the Patriot Act)

Crypto

This requires it's own subsection as crypto ranges from basically PayPal-level self dox to anonymous and designed for privacy.
The largest problem with crypto is that you can't really go buy a pizza with it (Well, someone did, for 10k BTC).

Bitcoin (BTC)

Positives

[+] By far the most accepted cryptocurrency online.

[+] Open source.

[+] All bitcoin transaction are public

[+] Supported by pretty much every single exchange, wallet

Negatives

[-] Blockchain is public

[-] 99% of exchanges and merchants selling with btc require KYC

[-] Pseudonymous

Monero (XMR)

Positives

[+] Every transaction is done from a different address

[+] Transactions are not public

[+] Cannot be realistically traced back

Negatives

[-] Not many wallets support it

[-] Hard to buy in the EU (although, exchanges like DFX offer it)

[-] Not widely supported.

So after that non exhaustive (Yes i know it sounds ridiculous but that's only the tip of the iceberg) list of privacy and anonymity oriented suites:
Remember that privacy is a human right. If they try to take it by force fight back!We've went through many authoritarian regimes in the past and always fought our way out. Let's fight our way towards a Europe, that respects our privacy!