*privacy from everyone except us, which conveniently makes our ad revenue line go up.

That’s a good word. I always love learning new words. Thank you!

It’s like they think V for Vendetta was a blueprint for how to run a utopia.

I have to imagine that most of these data brokers don’t have automated ways to remove information, it’s probably designed to be as annoying as possible to prevent people from doing it en-masse. If someone on mozilla’s end has to fill out a form and mail it and deal with ~200 brokers worth of constant intentional subtle constant changes (designed to break automation) to try and make services like this harder, the $9/mo seems almost reasonable.

Context/region blocking is a very quick and inexpensive path to basic security. At work I have sets of iptables rules to block regions by country code and by context (i.e VPN provider, datacenter provider, etc). I’ve found that some services will go from tens of thousands of brute force attempts per day to 1-2 per month. It really is crazy the amount of routine attacks that come through VPN providers if you host services in the professional world.

Does this mean that legitimate users can’t use a VPN to access our services? Yes, but we also don’t sell any data to any third parties so I don’t feel so bad about it.

We could certainly un-depricate it. It’s not like we need to reinvent the wheel here as a society on this.

Nobody knows your workflow better than you. The best answer anyone can give you is “experiment and figure out what works best with the hardware you have and the software you want to run”.