Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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(Hypothetically) How terrible would Privacy be if using dial-up internet in modern day? (lemm.ee)

submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was born in 2002 and wasn't really much exposed to the internet until 2012. I saw my older brother and sister watching YouTube on my Dad's laptop in 2007 with a (presumably ethernet) cable, but I'm sure they weren't using dial-up, and I think most people had abandoned it by that time.

Regardless, I was learning a bit recently about how dial-up worked, and saw that it was still possible to set up in modern-day; so it got me wondering what the privacy implications would be if I hypothetically were to use it. I imagine it would be terrible!

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

To be clear, Ethernet cable has no bearing on whether a connection was/is dial-up. It just means that it's a wired connection instead of wireless (WiFi).

At that time WiFi wasn't super widespread, so it wouldn't be super surprising if a laptop didn't support it. Especially if the laptop itself was a few years old.

With enough speed for youtube, you probably had some form of DSL, coming into your house through a coaxial cable, into a coax modem, then back out through ethernet cables.