Mikelius

Tor is definitely another option. For my personal use however, I have my entire network covered by a VPN so all outgoing traffic uses it.

I’m sure I could setup Tor to do the same, but I imagine my family and I would get blocked more heavily on sites, as well as get our bank accounts and such flagged or something.

Like many things, it obviously depends on your threat model.

Ultimately being truly anonymous on the internet is pretty hard, and thus VPNs are mostly helpful for getting around region blocks for streaming services, not for obtaining more privacy.

I disagree.

There seems to constantly be two sides of the privacy discussion with public VPN options and they’re both wrong on their own. It’s correct that using a VPN on its own is not enough to keep you private online, fingerprinting being one example to why. However, not using a VPN but having no identifiable browser fingerprint doesn’t either, since your IP is still a fingerprint too.

I like to give the following analogies:

1. Doing only an oil change on your vehicle but no other maintenance won’t keep your vehicle running forever
2. Doing all vehicle maintenances except oil changes won’t keep your vehicle running forever

If the goal is to be private, remember that a VPN is only one tool in a very large tool belt.

If you use nextcloud, especially for your friends and family, the passwords app is really good there. Plenty of apps and plugins available to use it everywhere.