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No, they're not. The solution is getting strong, enforced laws that protect our privacy and punish those who break them. But for the moment, with advertisers
by FridgeSeal 10y ago
No, they're not.
The solution is getting strong, enforced laws that protect our privacy and punish those who break them.
But for the moment, with advertisers viewing themselves as gods gift to the internet who think that all your information belongs to them simply by virtue of existing, and who will go to great lengths to acquire and store it all (for perpetuity), a solution is needed, and part of that is VPN's.
- JeremyBanks 10y agoHow do VPNs protect you against advertisers?
- pier25 10y agoBecause ISPs can't read your traffic
- nosuchthing 10y agoYes, but every website you visit can potentially ID you with cookies or browser finger prints.
- mirimir 10y agoWell, you compartmentalize in multiple VMs. Using different VPNs, Tor, and nested chains of them.
- brokenmachine 10y agoThings are getting very inconvenient at that point, all to avoid being snooped on by the people who are supposed to be representing us. What a sorry state of affairs.
- mirimir 10y agoYes, it is unfortunate. But hey, you gotta deal with what's so. There is a learning curve, and extra steps in configuring a working environment. But once the host and VMs are configured, uptime is no worse than with typical LANs.
- erentz 10y agoBut now the VPN provider can just track you and sell all your browsing history instead of the ISP, so how is this better?
- Mahn 10y agoIt's not. There's no way to verify the VPN provider is not keeping logs and tracking you.
- dredmorbius 10y agoThis is the principle-agent problem, generally. Audits and reputation may help.
- mirimir 10y agoBecause you have much more choice for VPN providers than for ISPs. And you can change VPN periodically, far more easily than changing ISP. Also, you can use nested chains of VPNs, much like Tor, to distribute trust. So adversaries must compromise multiple providers, quickly enough that logs will be available. Edit: Also, you can pick VPN providers outside your adversary's sphere of influence. That's standard advice for users in China, for example.
- JumpCrisscross 10y agoAlso, you can pay for a VPN without revealing your identity. Not so with ISPs. I use a VPN, for instance, to mask my Tor usage from my ISP. (I'm an American using the Internet in the United States.)
- mirimir 10y agoTrue. But the VPN provider effectively knows who you are, because they see your IP address. Or rather, a resourceful adversary can get your IP address from the VPN provider, and then get your identity from your ISP. If you chain VPNs, however, it certainly makes sense to lease the second/indirect VPN anonymously.
- surement 10y agoIn general, you can still identify users for advertising purposes without knowing their IP address.
- confounded 10y ago3rd party cookies and fingerprinting js is hugely different from "full take" at source.
- smnscu 10y ago> advertisers viewing themselves as gods Tangential point, I've heard from a friend how much you can earn by being involved in a "premium" ad network, and it's basically around 100x what I can make as a SWE freelancer. I also remember a HN user claiming they make $30k/month from a simple "YouTube downloader" kind of site.
- mirimir 10y agoBut even with laws, you can't trust ISPs and governments that pwn them. So yes, using VPNs is prudent.
- Bartweiss 10y agoData you release can never be recovered. Even if we were to chuck out the entire House and reverse this change in 2018, VPNs would still be a key part of the solution. It would only take one medical search sold to insurers (as a random example) to seriously affect you, so I agree that downplaying technical defenses is unreasonable.
- dredmorbius 10y agoYou can make holding and using that data highly intractable. If there are blisteringly strong penalties to holding and trading in personal data, the incentives to do so will largely disappear. Unfortunately, statutory regimes, particularly in the United States, seem to be going in the opposite direction. With the ability to seek out and purge disclosed data, at least some of the damage can be mitigated. Considering that there is far too much information for humans to ever process but a small portion of it, that might actually be sufficient -- we won't be needing the Men in Black eraser pens.
- Bartweiss 10y agoAll fair points, though I specifically had individual defense in mind. I don't know any good way for an individual to restrain accurate data once it's released, so poisoning is the only option I see to dilute the value of it. At least when thinking about individual defenses, I tend to treat the regulatory landscape as a lost cause - currently I'm just hoping that privacy tools won't be actively outlawed.
- dredmorbius 10y agoInformation-related activities have far more in common with epidemiology -- and at all kinds of levels -- than pretty much anything else. Whether it's concern of your data going out, or bad genetics patterns coming in, your best bet is to cut off the routes of transmission. In a plague-infested land, it's practicing exceedingly good hygiene which is in your best interest. If that means walling yourself off from the rest of society for a few years (as one royal household in Europe did), so be it. Keep in mind that the Black Death even eventually reached Iceland, though some years after it scorched over the rest of Europe (4-5 years as I recall). There are domains of problems which are intrinsically personal. Though rather more which manifestly are not. (Though you've also got me thinking about what equivalents to own information spreading out there are, epidemiologically.)