this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
153 points (93.7% liked)
Privacy
31597 readers
475 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Excuse me for my lack of understanding, but why are there so many people looking to hide their traffic from their ISP with a VPN? Isn't HTTPS enough? Are you afraid of ISPs resorting to DPI or MiM to spy on their users? Is customer protection so weak in the US that ISPs are free to spy on their customers using aforementioned techniques?
Edit: I just realized that I left out people leaving under authoritarian regimes, for whom VPNs are unfortunately required to evade their government.
This must have been pre-HTTPS since you'd need to MitM the SSL certificate for that to work
To me, the problem is you are instead giving over all of your info to the VPN company, and still be tracked by other means such as fingerprinting of devices, cookies/site data or browsing patterns. Is some random VPN company more trustworthy than my ISP and who’s to say they aren’t sharing the information? Plus, the could also be subpoenaed/NSLed if that’s the concern.
I'd be more willing to trust a VPN company with this data than an ISP. The former's entire business hinges on providing privacy to their customers while the latter can just sell your data to whoever they want and most people wouldn't bat an eye.
I'd have plenty of questions about the VPN company though. Some of these would be the same as ISPs, some worse for VPN companies.
Legitimate questions, but why would it be worse for VPN companies?
The way I see it, I have no way of verifying the answers to any of these regardless of whether it's an ISP or a VPN, but I do know that VPNs have a greater incentive to provide you with proper privacy because if they were found to fail at this, the entire business dies. ISPs run no such risk, especially since many of them are effectively monopolies.
Because HTTPS protects only things you do on the site. ISP still knows which sites you connect to. Which YouTube video you are watching to. etc. F.E. in Russia ISP's have to keep logs of users interactions for half of year and give it to government when they need them.
My opinion. I can't trust any government on this planet anymore. So much fuck ups and stupid decisions. So basically every government is kinda authoritarian for me...
Yes, because they know the IPs your packets go to, but if there are multiple websites behind a single IP they won't know which one (unless you use your ISP DNS server, which you should probably not)
No, because the URL is contained within the HTTP packets which are encrypted with SSL (the S in HTTPS), so unless the ISP does MiM, they cannot know which URL you are visiting.
Oh, thanks for this precision, I wasn't aware of this. And now that I think of it, it's obvious that the first exchange with a server has to be unencrypted
Hmm... You have way better knowledge than I am. It seems so. Should think about this things some time later 😉
Because my ISP stopped my internet access last time they were contacted by a copyright holder whose thing I torrented.