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!

It would presumably be the same it was essentially just a connection to the ISP so it is the same kinds of attack vectors browsing the wider web (arguably less since you presumably could call from random numbers and/or change ip address easily). The only one big thing I could think or is that since plain old telephone lines (POTS) were often directly interconnected (party lines/multiple phones to one line), someone could more easily pickup/tap the line to eavesdrop compared to broadband. USB modems do exist I believe 56k is the fastest you can find (iirc there was some FCC regulation limiting to 53k to prevent telco issues going faster, I believe 56-64k was the technical limit), but if you have a 2G phone that supports Circuit Switch Data you can use that and try out the magic of WML cards (specially formated html pages to run on phones) making up a WML deck / WAP site (mobile version of the site). There is a list of WAP sites here that may still work http://pubquizhelp.com/mobile/bestwap.html

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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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

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