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I have read many "privacy guides" on the Internet, if not too much and probably most of them, from the tip of the iceberg on the western media to the bed of the rabbit hole on Neocities and Tor. The point is, most of them is written by the westerner.
This is not surprising, the western culture favor solutionism, so they just show everything they see and communicate. Thing is different in the east, because they accept and tolerate the government, they don't want trouble, they accept scapegoat and sacrifice to live happily, you don't often see grassroots movements. And even if they do, it's light and fainted. So oftentimes you cannot find a proper document on privacy, because even if the write if very few people would practice and improve it, the government will be aware of it and easily have control over, and that's dangerous for the initiator.
In authoritarian countries, no one is free to protect the minority.
Grassroots movements always begin from small community. But in authoritarian regime, nobody has the freedom to protect the diversity. You either be the strongest or cope with the strongest, there's no way to fight against it.
And that's why the best security is obscurity.
The westerner usually say it is bad practice. Nothing comes from vacuum. They say it because they have a free background, being grown up in freedom defined their perception. But if they grew up in authoritarian country, they know privacy should not be publicly said, if you don't want whatever you said to be suppressed the next day. The conclusion is, most of "privacy guides" you *can see* is written by the person who *can show*, and only applicable to the places have that free culture.
Here in authoritarian countries, when we create a new tunneling protocol, we share it to our closed ones, we secretly rent an abroad VPS by crypto, and we use it in silence, nobody in tunneling club talk about tunneling club. We don't put it up on GitHub and proud of our achievement, because the first ones will clone it, you guessed it, are the state agents, not the fellow citizens, and they will block the protocol before it can even spread.
One of the thing I think ridiculous is that the accumulation of all kind of "brakes" nowadays, ads blockers, tracker blockers, anti fingerprint. Perhaps for a westerner, the only thing they want is to bypass annoying ads and paywall, their "privacy" — which is concern with trackers by big techs — is so different than the eastern "privacy" — which is control by the government. When you block those things, it's even easier to identify you. If you don't want to be identified, you have to *blend in*, not *stand out*, but in a wise way.
The only plausible thing to me — somebody consider it as "the tin foil hat tier" — is virtualization/compartmentalization, like Qubes OS. You need to use the most popular operating system, the most popular browser, don't block anything. Just behave like majority of the population, that will gie you the best chance going undetected. And boom, after the session, you can destroy the virtual machine, clear up thing, disappear like a dead man.