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But "what [I] do on the internet" is available to anyone snooping the internet between the VPN and whatever website I'm going to. HTTP request headers carry a l

But "what [I] do on the internet" is available to anyone snooping the internet between the VPN and whatever website I'm going to. HTTP request headers carry a lot of information, e.g. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/with-a-few-bits-of-data-researchers-identify-anonymous-people/?_r=0 https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/29/with-a-few-bits-of.... This is an arms race. If there is value in my data, surely someone is going to try to obtain it from the data flowing out of the VPN. No?

rhz 10y ago
You're not wrong at all. If you had an OpenVPN server running up in Canada that you set up yourself - you still have to worry about the connection that the VPN in Canada is making to the internet. _It_ connects to the internet through an ISP, too. One point of popular VPNs and overlay networks like Tor is that so many people do so many different things on the same IP that it becomes impossible to tell who's who from the thousands of people making outgoing connections from the same address, and the overlapping traffic is anonymizing in of itself. But yes no guarantee of privacy. Take into account that its better to have some security than no security at all. The argument you're making rings true, but I can say "Why have a lock on your door if someone can pick it and enter anyway?"
- geophile 10y ago
  Of course, I will put a lock on my door. I was just trying to understand how many windows I had wide open.