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You can already vpn pretty easily on an Android phone. The bigger issue is how do we know that the VPN is trustworthy?
by jimktrains2 9y ago
You can already vpn pretty easily on an Android phone. The bigger issue is how do we know that the VPN is trustworthy?
- larkeith 9y agoOne fairly trustworthy solution is to just set up a DigitalOcean droplet ($5/month) (or any other cloud provider, I just prefer DO), and host your own VPN. DO provides a guide at https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-16-04 https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-... With regards to setting it up on Android, that does alleviate this specific privacy concern, however it is still entrusting your OS to Google and our carrier, neither of which have the best track records in consumer information privacy. Android also has limited app access controls and frequently comes with carrier-required bloat/spyware.
- nerdponx 9y agoFWIW, DO can still see who is connecting to your droplet and what your droplet is connecting to. That's probably fine for staying out of sight from your mobile carrier. But many of the top VPN hosts now explicitly offer "no logging" as part of their services, like Private Internet Access. Don't forget that Android is open-source, open-source, non-backdoored versions of Android exist.
- codedokode 9y agoI used to set up my own VPN server. As I don't trust the firmware (that was trying to send the data to the manufacturer) I have implemented a whitelist-based proxy that would allow connecting only to approved sites. Pretty inconvenient to be honest because sites often pull content from many domains including numerous CDNs with long meaningless host names. A web version of Skype uses some 20 domains if I remember correctly.