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Yes, lots of people have other primary use cases? Why is that even a surprise? VPN companies are more trustworthy than my ISP. Many get third party audits and

Yes, lots of people have other primary use cases? Why is that even a surprise? VPN companies are more trustworthy than my ISP. Many get third party audits and publish results. And if the VPN company and server are in a privacy friendly country, they are hard to subpoena. Individual privacy being the default is itself valuable. This is leaving aside numerous other reasons like avoiding censorship or persecution or whatever.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
Yes, I was using a bit of hyperbole. But that said, on this point I do agree with the author: privacy improvements from using a VPN are marginal for the average user due to the now widespread use of HTTPS. Yes, your ISP can see which domains you visit, but that's about it. I'm curious if there have been any successful lawsuits or prosecutions based solely on domain access logs.
- RajT88 3y ago
  Unless you're using DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS. Then they can't. Side question: Anyone know of a gateway or self-host service which supports DNS over HTTPS relay? i.e. it will accept vanilla DNS requests, but if it needs to forward requests, it will only do so to DoH / DoT servers?
  - pgraf 3y ago
    They can still deduce it from the TLS SNI unless the web server you access supports TLS 1.3 Encrypted Client Hello. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
  - jachee 3y ago
    I do that with pihole.
Kwpolska 3y ago
I absolutely despise my ISP’s business arm, but I trust their network arm not to do something stupid. I certainly trust them more than a company in a remote tax haven with a broken legal system.
- nickburns 3y ago
  Sweden and Switzerland are hardly 'remote tax havens with broken legal systems.' you don't actually prefer your ISP's DNS service over something like say, Quad9's, do you?
Spooky23 3y ago
LOL. Several of the large ones are owned by the same entity. The main reason they exist is to do grey market bypass of controls becoming media access. If you trust them to not do some grey/shady exploitation of your metadata, more power to you. Sounds foolish to me.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago

Yes, I was using a bit of hyperbole. But that said, on this point I do agree with the author: privacy improvements from using a VPN are marginal for the average user due to the now widespread use of HTTPS. Yes, your ISP can see which domains you visit, but that's about it. I'm curious if there have been any successful lawsuits or prosecutions based solely on domain access logs.

RajT88 3y ago
Unless you're using DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS. Then they can't. Side question: Anyone know of a gateway or self-host service which supports DNS over HTTPS relay? i.e. it will accept vanilla DNS requests, but if it needs to forward requests, it will only do so to DoH / DoT servers?
- pgraf 3y ago
  They can still deduce it from the TLS SNI unless the web server you access supports TLS 1.3 Encrypted Client Hello. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Name_Indication
- jachee 3y ago
  I do that with pihole.

Kwpolska 3y ago

I absolutely despise my ISP’s business arm, but I trust their network arm not to do something stupid. I certainly trust them more than a company in a remote tax haven with a broken legal system.

nickburns 3y ago
Sweden and Switzerland are hardly 'remote tax havens with broken legal systems.' you don't actually prefer your ISP's DNS service over something like say, Quad9's, do you?

Spooky23 3y ago

LOL. Several of the large ones are owned by the same entity. The main reason they exist is to do grey market bypass of controls becoming media access. If you trust them to not do some grey/shady exploitation of your metadata, more power to you. Sounds foolish to me.