IP addresses matter for tracking. If they didn't, then Tor wouldn't exist. Of course a VPN is strictly worse than Tor, but it's often strictly better than a str

IP addresses matter for tracking. If they didn't, then Tor wouldn't exist. Of course a VPN is strictly worse than Tor, but it's often strictly better than a straight connection from your ISP. Knowing my IP address would get you within 5 miles of my house on most geo lookups, and that's information I'm transmitting to literally every single website that I visit. > discounting the fact that device / browser fingerprinting is a thing Device fingerprinting is something I can (to some extent) control locally on a site-by-site basis. I can disable Javascript, I can use containers, I can (to some extent) inspect what data websites can transmit. I can't control what a website does with my IP address, and I can't see how they store it or transmit it. Again, to the privacy fatalists who think that protecting against fingerprinting is impossible: why is Tor wasting its time with features like letterboxing? Why is anyone in the advertising industry getting worked up about 3rd-party cookie blocking if that doesn't matter? Do you think that Mozilla/Apple are wasting their time by trying to harden the browser interface? ---- I'm kind of done arguing with people about this, so my position has evolved. My new advice is that if you think that moving trust is a fundamentally broken, universally bad idea, then you don't have to move trust. Don't buy a VPN. But in that case, you should still be thinking about setting up your own VPN on a remote server. That will give you most of the same privacy benefits. It won't make it harder to build up profiles on you, but it'll still mask your physical location, it'll still give you some level of disassociation between your physical identity and your online identity. In the US, it'll still mean that you're moving trust away from known hostile entities (ISPs and routers). It won't protect you from the FBI, but the point of a VPN is not to protect you from the FBI. And honestly, deploying your own VPN on a remote server is simpler than trying to figure out whether or not DoH security is good enough to rely on yet (it's not, Firefox falls back on regular DNS when DoH fails), and whether or not ESNI is being widely used on most domains (it's not). Especially now that Wireguard has really come into its own and simplified this process, learning one thing is easier than trying to keep up to date with a dozen half-implemented security features. Anyone who doesn't have the technical chops to deploy a Wireguard server on Linode also probably doesn't have the technical chops to talk about ESNI and DoH. Because Troy is completely right -- as nice as those technologies are, they aren't widely deployed enough or correctly deployed often enough to rely on as more than a defense in depth.