Privacy

32109 readers

691 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

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

162

What VPN do you use to hide traffic from your ISP? (upload.wikimedia.org)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by FarLine99@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

248 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] squiblet@kbin.social 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] squiblet@kbin.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

do we know if they're compromised by our government or a foreign government?
Are their systems actually secure?
do they explicitly share data with a government, like they may be forced to?
do they sell data and just lie about it?
do they actually log data and lie about not logging or deleting it?
what if they do something like an exit scam where it turns out they did collect all your info, and then sell it before they close up shop?

[–] howrar@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

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.