Me too
Just had a "welfare check" yesterday from the police because I accessed Exit International 4-5 months ago. I didn't use a VPN and the only way they could have known is through tracking it online. Still fkn reeling from it.
I have PTSD link to police and it's set it off. A police car drove past me last night and I had a full blown panic attack. Might as well go and live in North Korea. I'd have more freedom.
Plus the police are supposed to operate the Right Care Right Person agreement because it's recognised that sending 2 coppers to someone's house when they have mental health issues isn't condusive to a positive experience but they thought that sending the police 5 months after I'd accessed the site was going to help . Bunch of W
️s
If you access something using https, then the contents between you and the website are encrypted. Sometimes your Internet Company or others will create a fake https certificate to try to see those communications, but hopefully by your browser querying the proper certificate authority you can be protected.
If someone says they know you accessed a site, they may only be pretending to know the contents of what was one the site. So if police say "We know you contacted Exit International and suicide makes the government upset!" and if you reply "I'm an intenet journalist doing an article on euthenasia. I hope one day to be an unbiased reporter at the BBC" then it would probably be very hard for them to prove you're lying unless they forged the certificate, although on some level they would know you're lying because there are no unbiased BBC reporters, as we all know. (I am not advocating lying to the police.)
However, some sites use analytics and determine who you are based on the browser fingerprint, which is a unique value linked to the unique hardware of your computer or phone that is obtained using javascript code that your machine runs locally after downloading it from a website. (For example, sanctioned suicide uses cloudflare insights, which likely says they are not selling any browser fingerprints when providing analysis about site statistics. However, many US companies have been shown to lie to everyone when the government asks, as shown by various whistleblowers, so who knows what cloudflare insights does once the information is obtained. This would unlikely to be used against SaSu visitors, however, since the government, if it does use cloudflare insights to learn things, probably wouldn't use it on suicidal people visiting a forum.)
Tor Browser protects against browser-based fingerprinting, even if you are using compromised Tor nodes. So let's say you connect to 3 nodes and they are all Germany and they are owned by a consortium of US, British, German, etc intelligence; they would know what you are doing if you're only using Tor. However, even if they know you're planning on committing suicide, they would probably not forward it to the police to avoid people knowing the nodes were compromised. However, if you are using Tor and a VPN, even if the three nodes are compromised, the Tor browser would protect your from browser fingerprint identification and the VPN may protect against knowing who you are too.
Although a VPN may be useful, or it could be a honeypot collecting information on users. It's also possible the government can break advanced encryption like AES-256 and other more extreme encryption, making VPNs useless at protection and also helpful to identify who has something to hide. However, it is also very likely that the government would not call the police on someone using these things out of fear that it would ruin the honeypot. In other words, if you use HonepotVPN and TorNodes 1, 2, 3, and if the police then come to visit you after visiting SaSu and you registered with an email address you've never used previously, you'll know they are all compromised and might tell people.
There are also rumors that governments save all traffic to be decrypted later and there are rumors that packets are analyzed while going through the Internet, allowing some tracing back of VPN connections. It's possible neither of those things are true.
I've never heard of anyone who uses whonix getting visited by the police.
www.whonix.org. For anyone who is most concerned, whonix or tails (tails.org) offers the most protection. The advantage to whonix instead of tails is you can use a VPN beforehand, preventing you from being compromised if you are only using 3 tor nodes and they are all compromised by the same entity.
If none of this makes sense, and you want more privacy, just go to whonix.org if you want the safest option.
Notice for UK-Based Users (Updated April 2025)
Using a VPN Is More Important Than Ever
Recommended VPNs (2025)
https://mullvad.net
A Note on Tor:
