[ruir]

As someone who cares about security and privacy, I'd like to know why I'd want to obscure the location of IRC/email traffic.

On IRC I can see that you could come across adversaries on some sketchy irc networks - but, in my case, as just a random developer idling away on freenode (using a host cloak) should I really care that I'm trusting freenode?

And what about email? Is that because your ip will be visible on the mail headers if sent from localhost?

And if you're using a VPN or Tor, aren't you just displacing the trust to those providers?

Another thing I'd like to know is just how much more of a potential target you become once you use the tor network. I speculate that tor has a lot of blackhats fishing for potential targets.