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It seems surprising that people would expect a VPN to be comparable to Tor. It does seem ridiculous once you spell it out like that, and then you have to reali
by fooker 5mo ago
It seems surprising that people would expect a VPN to be comparable to Tor.
It does seem ridiculous once you spell it out like that, and then you have to realize that it’s plausible to de-anonymize even Tor users by controlling exit nodes.
- curtisf 5mo agoMost of the big consumer VPNs include "privacy" with an implication of anonymity in their marketing, so it shouldn't really be surprising
- vintermann 5mo ago"Not knowing who a user is" privacy may still be useful even if you don't have, "not knowing two users are the same user" privacy.
- unselect5917 5mo agoIt is privacy with respect to your ISP. A lot of ISPs are pretty shitty. Some will rat out their own customers to copyright mongrels and threaten to disconnect you - which is important when there's a local monopoly. Things you connect to or log in to are clearly going to be able to ID you at least with in the context of the login that you use regardless of what the VPN does. I'm logged into HN through Mullvad as it happens. I usually leave it on regardless of what I'm doing because what I'm doing isn't my ISP's business even though I'm pretty happy with them.
- lucb1e 5mo ago> what I'm doing isn't my ISP's business even though I'm pretty happy with them. But it is Mullvad's? I think I'm from a spoiled part of the internet (as in, with an ISP that legit cares) so maybe I'm biased, but swapping one vendor out for another seems relatively no-op to me. Is it that there is a bigger pool of VPN providers than ISPs available at a given address (even when including (M)VNOs), and so it's easier to find one that sounds like they care as much as the ISP should have?
- SXX 5mo agoBut what privacy do you think majority of people who not doing something badly illegal expect from VPNs? Most likely these people just look to hide their torrenting, saying political shit on Twitter from employer and not share their choice of porn with local ISP. Also just adding one more layer between them and occasional scammer who can sometimes infer more broad geodata from their IP leaked from yet another database. Oh and now to avoid "Show your ID" page on the same porn sites. It works well enough for this goal. Not everyone needs NSA-proof solution. PS: Obviously more tech savvy people understand importance of hiding traffic on public WiFi, but I doubt average Joe the VPN user will buy VPN for this.
- illiac786 5mo agoSource? Why not “I don’t want to get profiled”?
- hdgvhicv 5mo agoThe mass surveillance industry doesn’t rely on ips or even cookies to track you.
- illiac786 5mo agoThat seems like a huge bet. I don’t bet on this, I am careful about cookies and my source IPs. Do you have any facts? I know they really on _additional_ stuff, but do you have sources showing that they never use cookies or source IPs?
- schubidubiduba 5mo agoHe said they don't rely on it. They can use fingerprinting. Obviously they'll still use any other data you give them, including IP addresses or cookies.
- illiac786 5mo agoOk, what was his point then? “They don’t rely on it, so it’s useless to obfuscate it”, or “but you should keep obfuscating it” or something else? I am missing the relation to my original comment then.
- duskdozer 5mo agoMaybe it's not expected, but one would think that they would also try to do what is feasible to provide privacy if they can.
- kevinmgranger 5mo agoI thought part of Tor's design was routing through multiple relay nodes, so even an exit node doesn't see the source IP?