You are, of course, correct. Whilst my post is only semi-serious, I agree that if I seriously followed the line of thinking then the entire system becomes unusable pretty quickly.

As you can see, I am adapting my threat model to trust less and less structures as I go through the post. As such, it would only really be relevant in the event of a rapidly evolving adversary and probably not even then.

My threat model is nowhere near as tight as is suggested by the contents of the post. The post is more of a thought experiment to see how quickly you can “invent” threats to get to holding all data only on an offline hard drive in a cupboard somewhere. Lol

Thanks. Is Tor browser as effective if not used over tor? My tracking blocking is via a VPN that I trust and want to continue using so I wasn’t thinking of using tor. I think I read somewhere that using VPN over tor or tor over VPN somehow became less private (I’m not technical so this might not be right - maybe someone could explain it). I was going to use Mullvad as I believe it has many of the same qualities as Tor browser but is more focused on use with a VPN rather than Tor.