Anything having to do with money is heavily surveilled

This is pretty much it, though it’s worth noting that the ones receiving money tend to get the bulk of the surveillance, it’s still fairly easy to send small amounts of money semi-anonymously

Perhaps the creators could be more sensitive to this side of things, by offering more private ways to donate money, like cash or prepaid cards.

This is a good point though it’s often down to the payment processors, particularly when dealing with prepaid cards. They deliberately don’t make it clear how decisions are made so bad actors can’t catch on, but it can mean Person A using a prepaid card has their payment accepted but person B using the exact same type of card has their payment rejected and card locked, with no clear reason why

VPNs are probably the biggest triggers for card-locking. OP, try disabling the VPN (and go to a library or cafe with a secondary device if you can) and try the payment again. And choose one-off payments, most places won’t accept prepaid cards for subscriptions

Everyone’s being so despondent. Of course it’s possible to convince someone to care about privacy. If they’re your friends, you’ll know them better than we do. What do they value? What do they care about?

In my experience more people care about privacy than you think. But they just think it’s hopeless. They’re constantly being told “There’s no point. Every company already knows everything about you. Give up.”

Bullshit. Even if ad companies have a nice tailored set of data on someone’s interests, behaviours, routines, etc. the moment that person cuts off the supply, that data starts becoming less relevant, less useful and less valuable every day. Once I explained that to a few people I had a bit more luck getting them to install ad blockers and stop posting so much personal info online

Talk to them in a language they’ll understand. If they deal drugs, tell them they’re much less likely to get caught using encrypted messaging apps. If they’re into true crime, point out how many stalkers were able to track their victims down using what they’d posted on social media

Sample IDs online, AI-generated fake IDs (one of the few good uses for AI). It depends on how the detection is being done. Uploading an image is the simplest, the ones that hijack your phone’s camera and gyroscope are trickier but not impossible. Pick an ID that can’t be easily checked automatically (e.g not every country’s drivers licenses have barcodes linked to public databases)

Do a bit of trial and error and turn it into a game. Remember under most circumstances you’re under no obligation to provide genuine personal info to these websites, the worst they can do is ban you