DeletedUser242
Awesome, political scare tactics. First off, this article is far too bare bones for it to consider itself a guide. An actual guide to protecting yourself from government surveillance would be many lines longer. It fails to mention GOS, tails and VMs. Those of which are notable tools that should have been there. And suggesting VPNs and Tor as a possible solution works to a decent degree, but lacks the suggestions of a proper OS, a VM to add on top of VPNs and Tor as well as tails for certain use cases.
It doesn't mention the pitfalls of using Tor, so the readers reading this will assume if they just use a VPN and Tor, the government won't be able to track them. While the guide points out useful tools, it doesn't point out the intricacies of how all these tools should be used and areas where your data could be at risk. Tor nodes are all public and many owned by governments. Over time it is possible to ID individuals by correlating packets and times of usage over Tor.
The suggestions for a desktop usage is not fleshed out enough. Doing only what they say in the article won't give them all the protections they need and the people reading this will get a false sense of security. Recommending face ID because of convenience is also not a good recommendation. Sadly, attaining what this article attempts to provide will never be convenient.
The lack of a GOS mention for phones will get people thinking they can get this level of privacy from an apple or android, but be sadly mistaken if they ever become a target.
Signal is a good recommendation, though as a guide would be good to mention how the servers are not open source. Which presents a point of weakness that people should be made aware of.
As a guide it doesn't get into what kind of apps to use, like open vs closed sources. It would be good to make the readers aware that certain apps are better than others. Since most people will have more than just a messaging app and a vpn on a phone.
Getting into security settings of the OS, phone, and apps should have also been in there.
I don't fault the author about not knowing this, but monero does have ways of being tracked. However it is still very difficult and can be avoided as long as those points are known. One of those tracking points is the fee being used when sending a transaction. It would have been a good idea to talk about wallets to use as well and how to properly use the wallet to mitigate potential risks.
So all in all, this "guide" reads more like a political piece than really being a thorough guide. It leaves out too much and doesn't provide a lot of important tools that someone would need. But hey, perfect opportunity for a scare tactic. It doesn't matter who is running government, citizens will always be at the mercy of the government. It should have been an unbiased article focusing only on the tactics rather than politicizing a changing governmental regime. They are always breaking people's privacy regardless of the leader. There are better guides out there people should be looking at, a news article is not a good place to get the kind of detailed information people actually need to help themselves.