u/Educational-Long-579

Hello. I don't post much and i'm usually pretty good at keeping track of my favourites, but this one in particular i'm royally stuck at, to the point i've started to wonder if i didn't entirely hallucinate this.

Pretty old webtoon, probably around 2017-2019 for running time, and it was already finished by the time i came across it in 2020. No clue about the artist's name, or the webtoon's name, i have a faint memory the webtoon had a V in the name, single word?

It had a very interesting and complicated plot, because the main focus was a group of teenagers in a city (which iirc is the webtoon's name?) investigating the child trafficking ring run by the most powerful in their city, which was very connected to the drug traffic in their city.

What i remember of the plot is basically that the MC is a guy who just got out of rehab and tries to contact his best friend, who seems on the phone to be having some sort of mental health episode; he speaks incoherently in a huge panic and then hangs up; the next morning the cops find him dead in an abandoned building. It's assumed an accident or a suicide, but it's obvious it's not because his remains showed signs of struggle and of being beaten.

That's the start of the story, as the MC starts gathering stuff about his friend's life but the more he tries to piece what happened the worst stuff he starts uncovering; and he gets help from the others closest to his now dead friend, which are his girlfriend, his secret boyfriend with whom he was cheating on her with, his best friend from the school football team, and a guy who wanted to help him because his brother was also struggling with addiction and missing, so he was looking to see if finding what happened to MC's best friend could help him find where his brother was.

Aside from that, the story gets pretty dark, but i liked that it has a somewhat of a happy ending while still remaining realistic.

The most easily particular thing about this webtoon though, is that it had a very uncommon artstyle.

It was messy, the lineart was scribbly, kind of as if many of the shapes were done withouth the artist lifting the pen off the screen. The colors were also pretty particular because they were almost always flat with some accents (like the MC having a permanently red tint to his nose) but the shadows were usually part of the lineart.

It was just very particular and unique and i really liked this webtoon because of how seriously it treated these topics withouth really stepping into morbidity or trying to present the characters as perfect; but i can't seem to find it anywhere, so i would appreciate if anyone has any clue if it still exists at all and what it's name is!

Okay, simple. My problem is that i've been lurking in this sub for about a year now and i keep running into the same absolute and unavoidable obstacle to degoogle: money.

And it's gotten me to thinking.

I'm not from the US, and i don't own dollars, plus i'm broke, i'm currently inbetween jobs and barely making ends meet. But, even if i was in a stable job with a solid regular income and had leftover to use it to pay for online services, i still wouldn't be able to afford most privacy solutions available and recommended here because of the monetary conversion between my country's currency and US dollar or even Euros, and that is in the not so many cases where there is a conversion at all.

Device change to a Pixel in order to run Graphene? Impossible. Even in the cheapest second hand devices i've seen, it would cost me almost twice what i pay in groceries on a good month. Plus, with the way things are going, AOSP seems to be getting closer and closer to being killed completely, so all i'm left with is to pray the Graphene Motorola that has been said to come out later this year will not cost me an arm and a leg.

Even a Jolla phone; which i think people much more intelligent than me have better explained the lackings of in this subreddit and other privacy related discussion forums; is out of the question because it doesn't exist here, period. I haven't found a single one in second hand, and to buy one brand new at 300 ish euros would equal to two times my complete paycheck in the best job i've had lately; with the added issue that they don't even ship to my country.

Paid VPN? Also out of my abilities. Mulvad, for example, does not have conversion to my coin, and even if it did, 5 euros a month is, again, an expense that would leave me dangerously lacking with how tight my finances are. For some context, one month of Mulvad VPN is around what i pay for water in a month.

Email alterantive? Proton is out of the question for a paid plan, and i need to switch a minimum of 3 gmail accounts so would be a TOS breach for a free account and i honestly don't feel like playing my luck with, say, the adress i use for applying to jobs; self hosting through my own domain as i've seen is recommended is also out of my posibilities because i can't afford to buy a domain, i tried tutamail for a single account and it is pretty barebones, again, can't afford any of their paid plans.

I could go on, but i think those three make my point pretty obvious (and those are my major issues aside from cloud storage and messaging which face a similar issue) and bring on my question: what can people not in the US or EU do for their privacy?

What can people like me, with tight finances, do to afford what is literally the privilege of privacy?

So far i've done what i can, like relying on the F-Droid store for most apps, switching to open source, using the best free alternatives and debloating my devices as best as possible.

I've switched my basics which were lesser of a struggle like the gallery, camera, calculator, SMS messaging app, notes, etc.

I've settled for DDG and Startpage as search engines, while using Firefox (because Watefox simply crashes and dies), and Brave as browsers.

Everywhere i can, i deny cookies, block ads and use extensions and scripts to avoid tracking.

But at the end of the day, the core things remain, and none of that actually matters when there's Google at the base of my device looking at my screen 24/7, Meta reading all of my messages on WhatsApp because it is the one and only messaging app everyone uses in my country, and if i don't, well, good luck getting a work call; then Microsoft knowing how many tiems a day i sneeze thanks to dear old Outlook and Teams.

Of course i'm aware that the only absolute privacy would involve zero internet and living in a mountain sorrounded by a Faraday cage, and even that would still not be a guarantee.

I understand that some things cannot be avoided.

But every time i look into this subreddit to look into updates of how Google now has access to another thing about me, or just to see what new alternatives are being recommended, or simply to see the discussions on pros and cons, i see one comment as a reponse to something at the very least once on every single post, be it discussion, questions or sharing news articles.

"If something is free then it can't be private."

In some shape or form, that is a comment i've seen in every single post here.

"If something is free then you are the product."

I'm not saying it's not accurate, or realistic. But i'm asking why that's just the shrug of shoulders we apply to everything.

"Nothing is free."

The other question i ask is a bit more political than standard for this sub, but bare with me for a second.

Why even in a space with the sole purpose of escaping abusive monopolies with unethical, invasive and frankly terrifying practices; is that sentence the norm?

When someone asks for a free alternative for a service, a non paid option, i can guarantee a form of that statement is in the top three comments.

See, i can't stop thinking about it because i'm at the other end of that sentence.

Because everytime that sentence comes up, i can't avoid seeing it come with a side of judgement.

A side of judgement that is either expressed as a criticism for someone who is perceived as lazy or uncaring enough about privacy to not want to pay for it, or, the on that i'm stuck in, judgement to those that can't pay.

The first one just operates on the assumption that everyone can or should be able to afford to pay for their privacy options. It also operates on not knowing if or what services are available outside of the US or the EU, because of not having to personally worry about that.

Or, possibly working on the belief that people from countries otside of those major technology giants plus a few asian countries like China, Japan, SK, or India, for example, don't use technology enough to have privacy concerns or if they do, they do not have the knowledge enough on technology to care about their online privacy. I don't say that it's incorrect, by the way, i'm just trying to share a thought on the way privacy is handled, in this sub or in other discussion spaces about privacy and decentralization.

Of course there is the added bias of it being an english speaking sub, which makes the two prior point much more understandable.

The other one i think is a bit more complicated and political that i'm willing to or even smart enough to dissect, but i'll put it in broad terms.

Privacy is a privilege and even in privacy discussion, it's believed that it should stay that way. That it should be a privilege for people intelligent enough to question big companies, and people that believe or just use products owned by monopolies, be it by convenience, lack of knowledge, or of availability to even make a decision, as that is the definition of a monopoly; deserve to remain inside of the data hungry system that supervises every single second and aspect of a person's life.

But even more than a privilege of understanding, there's the economical privilege.

Because if, like me, you don't live in a country that handles dollars or euros; you don't live in a country that has relevant data privacy legislation, and you don't have the economic solvency to pay for privacy focuaed services when you are lucky enough to have them available in your country, well, tough luck!

The majority of the solutions posted in here, especially the best ones, rely on economic affluence.

The best choice is to have a Pixel phone, which is mid to high priced device; with GrapheneOS, self host email and any form of cloud storage through having your own domain and self hosting servers, or just have all your relevant digital information in hard drives.

And when you run into a roadblock, like say, banking apps that require google play services, well, then we should all just have a 'normie' phone with all the invasive but unavoidable pats of life like mainstream messaging, social media, banking, work, etc.

After that point, the amount of bareness you have to apply to every single aspect of life in order to have a minimal semblance of privacy, you might as well go live in that mountain surrounded by a Faraday cage that i mentioned before, because privacy and sources of entertainment online don't tend to mix well; my biggest argument for this being videogames and all forms of legal streaming (discussing piracy as an alternative to this is out of this subreddit's topic and a breach of reddit's pain in the ass of a TOS so i won't go there)

So when like me, you can barely afford the half dead samsung with a smashed screen that you already own, what can you do?

What can i do if i want to stop feeding every second of my life to Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft but i can't afford to stop being the product?

What can i do if ethically speaking, i want to stop contributing to massive resource hoarding companies, to planet destroying bussiness models, but i can't pay to follow my own ethical principles?

Bevause at this point, my options to have an ever so slight sense of privacy while still having some use out of general digital interaction aside (and including) working to survive, are living in that mountain and...that's it, that's where the options end.

I wanted to open a discussion on this topic because i think it's worth talking about how privacy is treated like a privilege, and what actual, solid options are there for people who don't have any, and i would genuinely appreciate for anyone to give their input for this subject, especially those who've done this or thought about this for longer than i have.