Oddbean

1. Use a password manager 2. Use #Matrix 3. Use #Tor 4. Use #privacy email addresses 5. Buy things with #cash, #Monero, #Bitcoin or prepaid credit cards Pretty much in that order. If you want to dive into #VPNs, #FIDO2 #hardware, #passkeys, #Qubes, firewalls, burner phones, #VoIP lines, freezing your credit reports, and the like, that's cool, but get the basics down first.

In my opinion, very low. I've not heard of any American ISPs closing someone's account because they use Tor. As a bonus, if you use Tor, they won't be able to inject jacascript into pages you visit (I know for a fact Comcast does this), and the traffic flow data they may be selling will be less valuable to the buyer (orther than that they'll learn that Tor is getting more popular). Now running a Tor exit node is a different matter. If your ISP gets complaints because someone is spamming or "hacking" from your house, they're going to send you a nastygram and threaten to cut off your access. If you are just using Tor browser, you're nearly guaranteed to be fine.

Using Tor isn't super likely to avoid trouble with criminal groups (but it won't hurt either). Their main M.O. is to trick people or exploit known vulnerabilities in software and browser exploits are usually beyond their grasp. Instead they'll try to get you to download some sketchy program, or they'll send an email to trick you into sending them money, guess the password to your accounts, exploit your router and send out spam/malware... that type of thing. Tor can slightly help in that the sites you visit will likely be collecting less data about you, so when they get hacked and the data is leaked, there's less for the criminals to go through, but Tor is more focused on stopping big companies, data brokers and things like that. The fact that you your your threat model is evidence that you're far agead of the average person. 💪