Sorry if this is not the high brow discussion this com is for.

I travel a lot between different countries in the Middle East which have restrictive laws, and I live in one that is slowly becoming more competent technologically. I have to stay for an extended time in different places, so I’ve been connecting through always-on VPN out of the same place and it’s been working fine for now. But Digital ID laws are quickly going to close things off from me.

My risks that I’m trying to avoid are as follows: Locally, I want to make sure my IPs aren’t connected to public accounts. I don’t say anything online that can put me in jail for the most part, but I don’t trust that this will always be the case. I also would appreciate being a bit separated from the local internet. Elsewhere, I also don’t want my traffic to be monitored or my accounts to be tied back to my personal identity. For example, I don’t want to land in Dubai and to have my Steam account permanently affected by having “Spec Ops the Line” (banned game there) in my account (silly thing to worry about, but this is one tiny example out of many small issues that pile up). Plus, a lot of the internet is not accessible from these places, and I don’t like that, regardless of whether or not I want to peruse inaccessible internet stuff from there.

This has come with some serious downsides (online services are more expensive in Europe, where I have historically exited from), but it was/is worth the cost for me. Ironic that many VPN users seem to be trying to connect in the opposite direction than me (out of rich countries rather than in).

I’ve just been permanently using a single reputable VPN and single exit city for all of my traffic for the past while. Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible and I will probably have to exit out of somewhere new like Switzerland. I don’t know if those servers might be more trouble due to increased abuse for example.

Just want to know how others are dealing with this. Is just stomaching the wave of verifications after logging into all my emails from a new country the only price to pay? Is the world going to shit and should I rethink “just” using a VPN? Is it VPS time now that more and more things are being blocked from VPN access? Do I give up on the internet a decade ahead of schedule and chop wood in the woods until Israel’s AI mistakes my shack for a children’s hospital and drops heavy munitions on me?

I’m really hesitant to start using two sets of devices, some for insecure local traffic and some for encrypted traffic. I don’t think carrying like four laptops through airport security would keep eyes off of me.