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Don’t Use VPN Services (2015)

32 points by acqbu 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
romanichm12 3y ago
It's fascinating how VPN services have successfully marketed themselves as the ultimate privacy solution, when in reality, they are often just a middleman with full visibility into your internet traffic. How can we, as users, ever truly verify a VPN provider's claims of "no logging" or "complete privacy"? It's a promise based on trust, but why should we trust a company whose business model revolves around our data?
- EspressoGPT 3y ago
  It's especially fascinating how such a highly technical, rather nerd-ish concept is being marketed so widely. They did a great job there.
  - MattGaiser 3y ago
    It has lots of practical uses such as evading Netflix geo-restrictions or getting around local network restrictions, even without considering privacy.
    - mnd999 3y ago
      > Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy.
      - coldtea 3y ago
        What else would a proper VPN be besides a particular way to have a internet-wide proxy (as opposed to e.g. just a web proxy)?
        mnd999 3y ago
        Traditionally it’s a mechanism to connect to a private network via a public one, for example to access a corporate network from home. But a proxy doesn’t have to be a web proxy. Socks proxies were pretty common at one time.
- input_sh 3y ago
  > How can we, as users, ever truly verify a VPN provider's claims of "no logging" or "complete privacy"? Court orders. They might be lying to customers, but they're unlikely to lie to a court. So if a court approaches them and they respond with "we have no data", they have no data. Okay it's never gonna be no data, they'll still supply email address, payment method, registration date and similar things, but that's not my concern.
  - WithinReason 3y ago
    In addition, many VPN services have been tested in court like this and have been found to do no logging, showing they can be trusted.
Gasp0de 3y ago
That article is a bit useless. Yeah, some people may not understand VPN and believe it somehow works similar to TOR, but I believe most people do know what to use it for, and this website doesn't seem like it caters to mostly non-tech people.
tsukasagenesis 3y ago
you forgot that they solve a real problem like in Germany where torrent got you layer email
- frandroid 3y ago
  That's mentioned. Search for "scareletters".
jobigoud 3y ago
I don't use a VPN service to "hide myself", I use a VPN service to access content from other countries that is locked to that specific country. A use-case the OP seems to be completely oblivious about.
- dicytea 3y ago
  Arguably the most common use-case out there. Most regular people are certainly not subscribing to VPN services for the sake of privacy or anonymity.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- samuellevy 3y ago
  That's covered by the very first line of the main body of the article: > Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy.
  - blueflow 3y ago
    Imagine telling someone about your tincd setup to do NAT traversal and access your home server, and upon hearing the word "VPN" they ask what provider you use. I feel comment-grandparent's pain.
contctlink 3y ago
Building your own VPN is super easy and you can run it on a cheap VPS. I've been using mine for years and it cost me less than $2/month. (And it's fun to setup)
- nicbou 3y ago
  If you already have a server somewhere, an SSH tunnel is a great, cheap way to have a VPN for browsing. I use it all the time to evade country blocks when I travel.
- geek_at 3y ago
  you can even do it for free with a free tier oracle/google cloud server
- hardware2win 3y ago
  If it is just for browser Then you can use ssh socks proxy ssh -D 8080 login@ip And turn it on in firefox
- plyptepe 3y ago
  can you give more information about the setup?
- poisonborz 3y ago
  This takes out the ISP in terms of privacy, but you still have a unique trackable IP under your own name.
- zvr 3y ago
  I'm not sure that addresses some of the original article concerns. You've merely switched your home IP with your VPS IP, both pointing to you.
ariza 3y ago
in china and some few region, vpn is the only way to use twitter/Facebook/google and many web services fucked by GFW
- resolutebat 3y ago
  Yeah, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned as a use case. Although with sophisticated adversaries like the Great Firewall, even VPNs don't work very well.
thathndude 3y ago
But a VPN service is only additive. The way I see it, it’s one of two ways: 1. The VPN is being honest. No tracking. All is well. 2. The VPN is lying, tracking, maybe even reselling your traffic. Fair enough, but they’re not in any more privileged situation than your ISP. They still can’t see inside your TLS connections and whatnot. And you still get the ancillary benefits of: A. Geographic diversity of IPs; B. Easy to get a new IP; C. Security at potentially unsafe access points. So, worst case, for $80 a year you get some IP flexibility and security at Starbucks. Best case, you also get the whole no-tracking thing.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  > C. Security at potentially unsafe access points. > you get some [...] security at Starbucks This keeps coming up. What additional security do you get if everything is HTTPS nowadays? If you connect to unencrypted endpoints somewhere, why is a potentially untrustworthy VPN better than a potentially untrustworthy Wifi access point?
  - mu53 3y ago
    MAC addresses can be used to uniquely identify you, and then they can see what domains you are connected to. It really can tell them a lot especially factoring in background processes and capabilities of predictive ML right now. Its all about how far you spread your information. Giving it all to a VPN or spreading it across every wifi access point you need to use.
    - vladvasiliu 3y ago
      Don't most devices use randomized MAC addresses for Wifi nowadays? I don't have a Windows machine handy to verify, but I'm pretty sure even they do it. Not sure if it's the default, though. Ditto for MacOS. My Linux box (NetworkManager on Arch) does it, but I don't remember whether I had to manually turn it on. edit: according to [0], NetworkManager defaults to randomized for scanning, but not for connections. [0] https://blogs.gnome.org/thaller/2016/08/26/mac-address-spoofing-in-networkmanager-1-4-0/ https://blogs.gnome.org/thaller/2016/08/26/mac-address-spoof...
ThatMedicIsASpy 3y ago
Use a VPN service. Always, if you live somewhere that restricts any kind of traffic. I bought a lifetime VPN for 10€ 9years ago. I never trusted this VPN - mainly because of plain text login data on their website. They still have 3 servers online. I gave that to a person in Iraq almost 5 years ago. They are still using it.
SigmundurM 3y ago
Another great overview of how (and how not) VPNs protect your privacy: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/vpn-overview/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/vpn-overview/
thesaintlives 3y ago
Great article and mostly true. I use a vpn to download torrents and protect me from extortion demands!
7moritz7 3y ago
> Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy. The VPN provider can see all your traffic, and do with it what they want - including logging. That's incorrect, they can see your traffic if you are connecting without tls which basically never happens. Otherwise they see what your destination is, obviously. And anonymizing VPNs literally are proxies, noone is denying this. > The $10/month that you're paying for your VPN service doesn't even pay for the lawyer's coffee, so expect them to hand you over. Another nonsensical argument because subscription fees add up. A VPN provider with a 10 $ per month fee and a large userbase like the common providers makes an incredible amount of money. > VPNs don't provide privacy, with a few exceptions (detailed below). They are just a proxy. If somebody wants to tap your connection, they can still do so - they just have to do so at a different point (ie. when your traffic leaves the VPN server). Okay, get back to me with directions on how I install a blackbox at the Datapacket datacenters > If you absolutely need a VPN, and you understand what its limitations are, purchase a VPS and set up your own (either using something like Streisand or manually - I recommend using Wireguard). I will not recommend any specific providers (diversity is good!), but there are plenty of cheap ones to be found on LowEndTalk. If you've actually ever browsed Lowendtalk you'd absolutely not be confident in stating that none of the providers log. These are all super small fish without their own infrastructure. And you have a dedicated IP adress which defeats the user pool benefit per server. And additionally you'll need to maintain the OS and software yourself which isn't something a layman can or wants to do. > Because it's easy money. You just set up OpenVPN on a few servers, and essentially start reselling bandwidth with a markup. So OP suggests here, contradicting their previous claim, that VPN providers do indeed make a lot of money and as such wouldn't have issues with legal procedures. Also no, you'd still need to develop your clients. Anonymizing VPNs absolutely are a lucrative business but it's not that simple.
mongol 3y ago
I use a VPN when I query the Youtube API. I don't mind if this would be logged, I just don't want my real IP to be blocked.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cpach 3y ago
For reference, the original post is here: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29 https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29
Springtime 3y ago
Mullvad had national police come with a warrant and nothing was able to be obtained as they were able to prove their servers had nothing identifiable on them (and as such it would be illegal to seize anything per Swedish law). They also had a recent audit of their VPN servers and no leakage or logging was found. Among other factors they're the only such VPN I'm aware of to hold up under scrutiny. Do I even use a third-party VPN? No; but they're the only one I've seen that are as close to trustworthy.
- Geisterde 3y ago
  Proton also has a record for proving they don't keep logs due to a warrant.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Mullvad had national police come with a warrant and nothing was able to be obtained as they were able to prove their servers had nothing identifiable on them (and as such it would be illegal to seize anything per Swedish law). They also had a recent audit of their VPN servers and no leakage or logging was found. Of course that requires trusting the police report and the auditor (and that the audit process didn't happen while they were on a different operation mode than their usual, and that the police case wasn't on some class of persons who they don't log, while for others, e.g. when they get "special orders" they do)...
  - Springtime 3y ago
    The author of the OP's article was making the case that there's 'no way' to verify whether a third-party VPN logs and thus as their broad conclusion none should be used. If the baseline position is that any company can and will lie, regardless of available knowledge about law enforcement intervention or audits then one could say nothing can really be trusted (even hardware we utilize everyday), since there's always some potential undisclosed 'gotcha'. Otherwise it's where one draws the line of verifiability. There have been other VPNs that haven't held up under scrutiny and been found logging (and had poor security), while Mullvad goes into detail about their infrastructure, mitigation methods (including some quite paranoid anti-tamper hardware techniques, which anecdotally the founders were into prior to forming the company), has had various audits, resisted a warrant and apparently doesn't spend on advertising. Could all these things be some elaborate ruse? Possibly. There will always be some judgment call.
Heaton_dev 3y ago
> If somebody wants to tap your connection, they can still do so - they just have to do so at a different point (ie. when your traffic leaves the VPN server). Conflating "I use a VPN because my commercial ISP would probably sell my data if given the chance" with "I'm a potitical dissident being directly attacked by a nation-state actor". You can still use a VPN despite it being vulnerable to your governments quantum computer... Sure, it's hard to find a trustworthy VPN provider, but that's not to say they don't exist
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
I tend to use an SSH tunnel over a VPN these days. I can control the server, and it's in many ways less 'suspicious' than VPN traffic. There doesn't seem to be any performance difference.
Bu9818 3y ago
>Why not? Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy. The VPN provider can see all your traffic, and do with it what they want - including logging. Most people use VPNs because they are a glorified proxy. >Doesn't matter. You're still connecting to their service from your own IP, and they can log that. This is true, although it can be possible to connect to the VPN from Tor (when using OpenVPN or WireGuard-over-TCP). Obviously, all traffic could be associated with your account so don't use multiple identities if you want reasonable anonymity. And it's slow, so it's usually not worth it. >VPNs don't provide privacy, with a few exceptions (detailed below). They are just a proxy. If somebody wants to tap your connection, they can still do so - they just have to do so at a different point (ie. when your traffic leaves the VPN server). Your ISP cannot. Some (many?) countries like Australia have data retention laws. A VPN will hide your traffic from your ISP (although probably not a large sufficiently motivated adversary like a government out to get you), which can be useful even if your VPN provider can log your traffic. (there may be some things like traffic analysis where they might be able to guess the type of traffic you're using, though I'm not sure how effective if is or if many ISPs actually attempt this) >Your IP address is a largely irrelevant metric in modern tracking systems. Marketers have gotten wise to these kind of tactics, and combined with increased adoption of CGNAT and an ever-increasing amount of devices per household, it just isn't a reliable data point anymore. >Marketers will almost always use some kind of other metric to identify and distinguish you. That can be anything from a useragent to a fingerprinting profile. A VPN cannot prevent this. This is true, though the impact can be somewhat minimized with Tor Browser with the Tor proxy disabled (or Mullvad Browser), which have decent fingerprinting mitigations. >In the second case, you'd probably just want a regular proxy specifically for that traffic - sending all of your traffic over a VPN provider (like is the default with almost every VPN client) will still result in the provider being able to snoop on and mess with your traffic. Do any regular proxy (socks5/http) providers provide the same quality of service as VPN providers? And you can't port forward over a socks5 proxy, which can be useful for torrenting. (if you're downloading popular content you don't need it, but if you're downloading torrents with only a few seeders or maximizing the amount of upload you get on a private tracker, port forwarding can be useful). Also, if you're on Linux you can use network namespaces to use some applications over VPNs and not others. (remember to refresh private keys and use a different server before using the namespace for a different identity) >If you absolutely need a VPN, and you understand what its limitations are, purchase a VPS >A VPN provider specifically seeks out those who are looking for privacy, and who may thus have interesting traffic. Statistically speaking, it is more likely that a VPN provider will be malicious or a honeypot, than that an arbitrary generic VPS provider will be. VPSes are arguably worse for some use cases as most probably don't handle DMCAs as well as commercial VPNs, you don't have access to a large amount of servers and countries to change your IP address, and you have less people to blend in with. I see your point, though I'm not sure how true that is.
28304283409234 3y ago
Can we permaban this nonsense? "It depends on the usecase."
Nellyz 3y ago
[dead]

32 points by acqbu 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

It's fascinating how VPN services have successfully marketed themselves as the ultimate privacy solution, when in reality, they are often just a middleman with full visibility into your internet traffic. How can we, as users, ever truly verify a VPN provider's claims of "no logging" or "complete privacy"? It's a promise based on trust, but why should we trust a company whose business model revolves around our data?

EspressoGPT 3y ago
It's especially fascinating how such a highly technical, rather nerd-ish concept is being marketed so widely. They did a great job there.
- MattGaiser 3y ago
  It has lots of practical uses such as evading Netflix geo-restrictions or getting around local network restrictions, even without considering privacy.
  - mnd999 3y ago
    > Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy.
    - coldtea 3y ago
      What else would a proper VPN be besides a particular way to have a internet-wide proxy (as opposed to e.g. just a web proxy)?
      - mnd999 3y ago
        Traditionally it’s a mechanism to connect to a private network via a public one, for example to access a corporate network from home. But a proxy doesn’t have to be a web proxy. Socks proxies were pretty common at one time.
input_sh 3y ago
> How can we, as users, ever truly verify a VPN provider's claims of "no logging" or "complete privacy"? Court orders. They might be lying to customers, but they're unlikely to lie to a court. So if a court approaches them and they respond with "we have no data", they have no data. Okay it's never gonna be no data, they'll still supply email address, payment method, registration date and similar things, but that's not my concern.
- WithinReason 3y ago
  In addition, many VPN services have been tested in court like this and have been found to do no logging, showing they can be trusted.

Gasp0de 3y ago

That article is a bit useless. Yeah, some people may not understand VPN and believe it somehow works similar to TOR, but I believe most people do know what to use it for, and this website doesn't seem like it caters to mostly non-tech people.

tsukasagenesis 3y ago

you forgot that they solve a real problem like in Germany where torrent got you layer email

frandroid 3y ago
That's mentioned. Search for "scareletters".

jobigoud 3y ago

I don't use a VPN service to "hide myself", I use a VPN service to access content from other countries that is locked to that specific country. A use-case the OP seems to be completely oblivious about.

dicytea 3y ago
Arguably the most common use-case out there. Most regular people are certainly not subscribing to VPN services for the sake of privacy or anonymity.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
samuellevy 3y ago
That's covered by the very first line of the main body of the article: > Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy.
- blueflow 3y ago
  Imagine telling someone about your tincd setup to do NAT traversal and access your home server, and upon hearing the word "VPN" they ask what provider you use. I feel comment-grandparent's pain.

contctlink 3y ago

Building your own VPN is super easy and you can run it on a cheap VPS. I've been using mine for years and it cost me less than $2/month. (And it's fun to setup)

nicbou 3y ago
If you already have a server somewhere, an SSH tunnel is a great, cheap way to have a VPN for browsing. I use it all the time to evade country blocks when I travel.
geek_at 3y ago
you can even do it for free with a free tier oracle/google cloud server
hardware2win 3y ago
If it is just for browser Then you can use ssh socks proxy ssh -D 8080 login@ip And turn it on in firefox
plyptepe 3y ago
can you give more information about the setup?
poisonborz 3y ago
This takes out the ISP in terms of privacy, but you still have a unique trackable IP under your own name.
zvr 3y ago
I'm not sure that addresses some of the original article concerns. You've merely switched your home IP with your VPS IP, both pointing to you.

ariza 3y ago

in china and some few region, vpn is the only way to use twitter/Facebook/google and many web services fucked by GFW

resolutebat 3y ago
Yeah, I'm surprised this wasn't mentioned as a use case. Although with sophisticated adversaries like the Great Firewall, even VPNs don't work very well.

thathndude 3y ago

But a VPN service is only additive. The way I see it, it’s one of two ways: 1. The VPN is being honest. No tracking. All is well. 2. The VPN is lying, tracking, maybe even reselling your traffic. Fair enough, but they’re not in any more privileged situation than your ISP. They still can’t see inside your TLS connections and whatnot. And you still get the ancillary benefits of: A. Geographic diversity of IPs; B. Easy to get a new IP; C. Security at potentially unsafe access points. So, worst case, for $80 a year you get some IP flexibility and security at Starbucks. Best case, you also get the whole no-tracking thing.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
> C. Security at potentially unsafe access points. > you get some [...] security at Starbucks This keeps coming up. What additional security do you get if everything is HTTPS nowadays? If you connect to unencrypted endpoints somewhere, why is a potentially untrustworthy VPN better than a potentially untrustworthy Wifi access point?
- mu53 3y ago
  MAC addresses can be used to uniquely identify you, and then they can see what domains you are connected to. It really can tell them a lot especially factoring in background processes and capabilities of predictive ML right now. Its all about how far you spread your information. Giving it all to a VPN or spreading it across every wifi access point you need to use.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    Don't most devices use randomized MAC addresses for Wifi nowadays? I don't have a Windows machine handy to verify, but I'm pretty sure even they do it. Not sure if it's the default, though. Ditto for MacOS. My Linux box (NetworkManager on Arch) does it, but I don't remember whether I had to manually turn it on. edit: according to [0], NetworkManager defaults to randomized for scanning, but not for connections. [0] https://blogs.gnome.org/thaller/2016/08/26/mac-address-spoofing-in-networkmanager-1-4-0/ https://blogs.gnome.org/thaller/2016/08/26/mac-address-spoof...

ThatMedicIsASpy 3y ago

Use a VPN service. Always, if you live somewhere that restricts any kind of traffic. I bought a lifetime VPN for 10€ 9years ago. I never trusted this VPN - mainly because of plain text login data on their website. They still have 3 servers online. I gave that to a person in Iraq almost 5 years ago. They are still using it.

SigmundurM 3y ago

Another great overview of how (and how not) VPNs protect your privacy: https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/vpn-overview/ https://www.privacyguides.org/en/basics/vpn-overview/

thesaintlives 3y ago

Great article and mostly true. I use a vpn to download torrents and protect me from extortion demands!

7moritz7 3y ago

> Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy. The VPN provider can see all your traffic, and do with it what they want - including logging. That's incorrect, they can see your traffic if you are connecting without tls which basically never happens. Otherwise they see what your destination is, obviously. And anonymizing VPNs literally are proxies, noone is denying this. > The $10/month that you're paying for your VPN service doesn't even pay for the lawyer's coffee, so expect them to hand you over. Another nonsensical argument because subscription fees add up. A VPN provider with a 10 $ per month fee and a large userbase like the common providers makes an incredible amount of money. > VPNs don't provide privacy, with a few exceptions (detailed below). They are just a proxy. If somebody wants to tap your connection, they can still do so - they just have to do so at a different point (ie. when your traffic leaves the VPN server). Okay, get back to me with directions on how I install a blackbox at the Datapacket datacenters > If you absolutely need a VPN, and you understand what its limitations are, purchase a VPS and set up your own (either using something like Streisand or manually - I recommend using Wireguard). I will not recommend any specific providers (diversity is good!), but there are plenty of cheap ones to be found on LowEndTalk. If you've actually ever browsed Lowendtalk you'd absolutely not be confident in stating that none of the providers log. These are all super small fish without their own infrastructure. And you have a dedicated IP adress which defeats the user pool benefit per server. And additionally you'll need to maintain the OS and software yourself which isn't something a layman can or wants to do. > Because it's easy money. You just set up OpenVPN on a few servers, and essentially start reselling bandwidth with a markup. So OP suggests here, contradicting their previous claim, that VPN providers do indeed make a lot of money and as such wouldn't have issues with legal procedures. Also no, you'd still need to develop your clients. Anonymizing VPNs absolutely are a lucrative business but it's not that simple.

mongol 3y ago

I use a VPN when I query the Youtube API. I don't mind if this would be logged, I just don't want my real IP to be blocked.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

cpach 3y ago

For reference, the original post is here: https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29 https://gist.github.com/joepie91/5a9909939e6ce7d09e29

Springtime 3y ago

Mullvad had national police come with a warrant and nothing was able to be obtained as they were able to prove their servers had nothing identifiable on them (and as such it would be illegal to seize anything per Swedish law). They also had a recent audit of their VPN servers and no leakage or logging was found. Among other factors they're the only such VPN I'm aware of to hold up under scrutiny. Do I even use a third-party VPN? No; but they're the only one I've seen that are as close to trustworthy.

Geisterde 3y ago
Proton also has a record for proving they don't keep logs due to a warrant.
coldtea 3y ago
>Mullvad had national police come with a warrant and nothing was able to be obtained as they were able to prove their servers had nothing identifiable on them (and as such it would be illegal to seize anything per Swedish law). They also had a recent audit of their VPN servers and no leakage or logging was found. Of course that requires trusting the police report and the auditor (and that the audit process didn't happen while they were on a different operation mode than their usual, and that the police case wasn't on some class of persons who they don't log, while for others, e.g. when they get "special orders" they do)...
- Springtime 3y ago
  The author of the OP's article was making the case that there's 'no way' to verify whether a third-party VPN logs and thus as their broad conclusion none should be used. If the baseline position is that any company can and will lie, regardless of available knowledge about law enforcement intervention or audits then one could say nothing can really be trusted (even hardware we utilize everyday), since there's always some potential undisclosed 'gotcha'. Otherwise it's where one draws the line of verifiability. There have been other VPNs that haven't held up under scrutiny and been found logging (and had poor security), while Mullvad goes into detail about their infrastructure, mitigation methods (including some quite paranoid anti-tamper hardware techniques, which anecdotally the founders were into prior to forming the company), has had various audits, resisted a warrant and apparently doesn't spend on advertising. Could all these things be some elaborate ruse? Possibly. There will always be some judgment call.

Heaton_dev 3y ago

> If somebody wants to tap your connection, they can still do so - they just have to do so at a different point (ie. when your traffic leaves the VPN server). Conflating "I use a VPN because my commercial ISP would probably sell my data if given the chance" with "I'm a potitical dissident being directly attacked by a nation-state actor". You can still use a VPN despite it being vulnerable to your governments quantum computer... Sure, it's hard to find a trustworthy VPN provider, but that's not to say they don't exist

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

I tend to use an SSH tunnel over a VPN these days. I can control the server, and it's in many ways less 'suspicious' than VPN traffic. There doesn't seem to be any performance difference.

Bu9818 3y ago

>Why not? Because a VPN in this sense is just a glorified proxy. The VPN provider can see all your traffic, and do with it what they want - including logging. Most people use VPNs because they are a glorified proxy. >Doesn't matter. You're still connecting to their service from your own IP, and they can log that. This is true, although it can be possible to connect to the VPN from Tor (when using OpenVPN or WireGuard-over-TCP). Obviously, all traffic could be associated with your account so don't use multiple identities if you want reasonable anonymity. And it's slow, so it's usually not worth it. >VPNs don't provide privacy, with a few exceptions (detailed below). They are just a proxy. If somebody wants to tap your connection, they can still do so - they just have to do so at a different point (ie. when your traffic leaves the VPN server). Your ISP cannot. Some (many?) countries like Australia have data retention laws. A VPN will hide your traffic from your ISP (although probably not a large sufficiently motivated adversary like a government out to get you), which can be useful even if your VPN provider can log your traffic. (there may be some things like traffic analysis where they might be able to guess the type of traffic you're using, though I'm not sure how effective if is or if many ISPs actually attempt this) >Your IP address is a largely irrelevant metric in modern tracking systems. Marketers have gotten wise to these kind of tactics, and combined with increased adoption of CGNAT and an ever-increasing amount of devices per household, it just isn't a reliable data point anymore. >Marketers will almost always use some kind of other metric to identify and distinguish you. That can be anything from a useragent to a fingerprinting profile. A VPN cannot prevent this. This is true, though the impact can be somewhat minimized with Tor Browser with the Tor proxy disabled (or Mullvad Browser), which have decent fingerprinting mitigations. >In the second case, you'd probably just want a regular proxy specifically for that traffic - sending all of your traffic over a VPN provider (like is the default with almost every VPN client) will still result in the provider being able to snoop on and mess with your traffic. Do any regular proxy (socks5/http) providers provide the same quality of service as VPN providers? And you can't port forward over a socks5 proxy, which can be useful for torrenting. (if you're downloading popular content you don't need it, but if you're downloading torrents with only a few seeders or maximizing the amount of upload you get on a private tracker, port forwarding can be useful). Also, if you're on Linux you can use network namespaces to use some applications over VPNs and not others. (remember to refresh private keys and use a different server before using the namespace for a different identity) >If you absolutely need a VPN, and you understand what its limitations are, purchase a VPS >A VPN provider specifically seeks out those who are looking for privacy, and who may thus have interesting traffic. Statistically speaking, it is more likely that a VPN provider will be malicious or a honeypot, than that an arbitrary generic VPS provider will be. VPSes are arguably worse for some use cases as most probably don't handle DMCAs as well as commercial VPNs, you don't have access to a large amount of servers and countries to change your IP address, and you have less people to blend in with. I see your point, though I'm not sure how true that is.

28304283409234 3y ago

Can we permaban this nonsense? "It depends on the usecase."

Nellyz 3y ago

[dead]