chicken

it's called milliseconds since epoch

It really depends on what you want to be private and who you don't want seeing it. If you are torrenting pirated movies a VPN is great for privacy. What are her main worries about privacy?

It is saying to change their mind...

if somehow the population of pirates increases, that will lead to maybe tighter controls on piracy or a more global crackdown of piracy

Yes, I think most people accept that this is how it would likely work. And it actually is the case that many pirates do not agree with what I am saying, and see this as something to be avoided by keeping piracy niche, and would like to preserve their own access that way, and use this reasoning to argue against greater accessibility. But it's kind of like voting; any action you can take as an individual affecting the broader society is unlikely to make much difference in determining outcomes that affect you personally. It's possible to mistakenly imagine that they do, it's possible to not be thinking about it at all, and it's possible to have different ideas about what you would like to affect; for instance a person wanting to keep piracy niche might have some idea of a group identity of more technically literate and connected insiders like themselves, and want to act to protect the interests of maintaining media access for that group.

To me, this subjectivity of goals and the relative absence of direct personal consequences make these choices very unlike a game of prisoner's dilemma, in which you can expect the consequences of your choices to be unambiguous, tangible, and personally experienced. Instead of working out an optimization problem for clearly defined personal interests that are the same for all actors, the task is one of empathy and imagination - what can the world look like, what should it look like, who do we care about and what do we want for them? How do different visions of the world weigh against each other?

We definitely don’t want more people to pirate

Many of us do. Why would we seed torrents, donate to crackers and repackers, offer useful advice etc. if we did not? Personally I would prefer for everyone to stop paying money for software and media entirely, and for the industries that produce those things to collapse, and the legal structures protecting them to be dismantled, because I think we would create better stuff without financial incentives. Not everyone is operating under your idea of a rational perspective here.

I have no idea because I use browser tools to hide the element that shows vote scores. If people don't like what I have to say and want me to know about it they can take the time to write a response.

That's a fair argument, but what I'm saying is more wondering to what extent this is really how things work and how that can be confirmed, than making a statement about how things should be. Every time I see this discussion everything is extrapolated from this single court case about a single police department.

This is widely cited and I agree it happened and it's messed up, but I think it would be more interesting to see some kind of broader analysis of how common this practice is, which I haven't been able to find solid information on. I've seen this a number of times and there are always comments offering speculation on how the system works, and maybe a few anecdotes, but I've talked to people who are skeptical that this is a larger phenomenon and I can't exactly offer anything to prove it to them.

That frozen broccoli is pretty good and useful, great choice

Wasn't Prometheus about those guys?

setting up a trusted, cheap VPS or something as your VPN exit point

I think this would likely have the same problem since they are probably checking whether the traffic is coming from a datacenter vs a residential connection

I buy the centralization/trust criticism, if not the idea that government id would be an acceptable or functioning alternative (it's not the case that every government is trustworthy or that everyone in the world has id or that those ids are easily verifiable). There's also the problem of people being able to just sell their credentials. But it still seems misleading to focus on the idea that there is a big danger here of biometric data being collected when it likely isn't and when it already is used and collected in many other contexts.