It took an embarrassing amount of trying to figure out the business model my VPN provider was going for—and its implications for my privacy—before I remembered the date.

I’m currently at the 2024 conference for the Society of the Scientific Study of Religion, where the Mormon Social Science Association always organizes a number of panels. (I presented on a reactionary Mormon Twitter hashtag earlier today!). MSSA traditionally has a Saturday evening no-host dinner, and as long as I’ve attended (okay, only since 2021), we’ve relied on a foodie board member to find a place for us to eat. Rick isn’t here this year, and somehow that got turned into my becoming responsible for finding us a restaurant to meet, eat, and chat at.

I have a burner reddit account (for research purposes) that I only access through Tor, so the “communities near you” that pops up whenever I log in is consistently both amusingly wrong and genuinely (if not completely) informative.

It looks like I can’t access my institution’s Qualtrics survey when I have my VPN turned on. Is this an anti-spam measure, or is something else going on?

Last week, I noticed that my RSS reader was no longer refreshing feeds from my local newspaper’s website. Today, I discovered it’s associated with VPN use. Anyone know what’s going on?