Being privacy-conscious comes with some downsides

I just uninstalled Pi-hole. It kind of ruined a little bit of my life.

I had a very time-sensitive and bureaucratic thing to do. It involved making an appointment. I've been trying to find an available slot multiple times a day for months. I was frustrated and desperate.

It's one of those highly bureaucratic, annoying processes. The support team is horrible, and I was completely stuck.

After trying every combination of browsers, turning off extensions and devices I could think of, I eventually missed the deadline. Then I randomly checked the site on my phone yesterday, and it was working. There were appointment slots available (even though it didn't help me anymore).

I tore my hair out trying to figure out what had happened.

Apparently, the site relied on some trackers, and data from those trackers was used to send the visitor's location as part of the form request. Bad engineering, for sure. But whatever the reason, I never figured it out because I disabled browser extensions, switched browsers, and tested different devices but I was always using the pihole DNS.

The whole architecture of Pi-hole is "set it and forget it"—and I forgot it was even there.

The modern web relies on countless systems that interfere with your privacy. The more privacy-conscious you become, the more you end up hurting your own internet experience. Some people block JavaScript, block everything, or use Tor exclusively. I sometimes feel like those folks end up with a more miserable life at a cost of a secure one.

I think drawing the line at an ad blocker extension is enough. We're cooked when it comes to privacy. The framework of the modern web is basically: consent or exit. There isn't much room for anything else.

Maybe I'm stupid. Maybe I should have figured this out sooner. But I think being part of the mainstream internet probably gives you a slightly more frictionless experience than being highly privacy-conscious ever will.

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ilkhan4 18 hours ago | parent [-]

Pi-hole does have a feature where you can temporarily disable it for exceptional cases like that. You could have used that instead of uninstalling it altogether.

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wqtz 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The issue is that I did not discover the problem until it was already too late. Then I asked myself is DNS level filtering even useful for me? A traditional browser based adblocker already does the job. Pihole does not block ads YouTube.

The quality of life improvement of having pihole was minimum. I would rather just use cloudflare or google's DNS. What value prop pihole provides I have no idea. I think that is what I feel about many if not all privacy focused tooling this way.

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JohnFen 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Being unfamiliar with tools you rely on comes with some downsides, it appears.

	▲	wqtz 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Privacy tooling often is devoid of common human nature which is get shit done without making a religion out of it. Good tools are not configurable or dynamic, they just serve a purpose. A hammer or a toaster over...these are good tools. The issue with privacy tools is more about the movement and mission aspect of it. I underestimated how prolific the idea of tracker - first engineering. Tracking (by the defintion of privacy advocate) is inherent in many if not most system. The privacy preaching that I have been subject to made me believe that privacy is a one button tool. Whether open source or privacy, I feel like has very little net utility when you offset it by convenience or consequences. You can pay for YouTube premium or you can update the sideloaded app every other week.