No Stupid Questions

All I know is that if you're very worried about being surveilled by governments, the Fediverse is the absolute last place you should want to be.

This is one of the most transparent platforms we have come up with yet. Instead of all your data only being viewable by a host company, it's viewable and able to be analyzed by basically anyone who puts some effort in. This makes it economically worthless, can't really sell something that everyone can already just get for themselves.

We're all out in the open here. So, wave to all the national security agencies everyone. Hiiiii! Hope you're all enjoying the memes!

Nah, most governments can just buy that data from the most of the VPNs if they need to - no need for secrecy.

If you think nord VPN is protecting you from government surveillance I have a bridge to sell you - it's really affordable.

I fear false privacy because a corporation runs it. I've never been afraid of a government but I worry about corporate shittery all the time.

Slightly off-topic rant:

I hate how the 'VPN' term has been took over by companies selling services using VPN technology.

VPN was initially 'Virtual Private Network' – used to securely connect own (as belonging to an organization or person) devices over a public network. Like securely connecting bank branches. Or allowing employee connect to a company network. And VPN are still used that way. They are secure and provide the privacy needed.

Now when people say 'VPN' they often mean a service where they use VPN software (initially designed for the use case mentioned above) to connect to the public interned via some third-party. This is not a 'private network' any more. It just changes who you need to trust with you network activity. And changes how others may see you (breaking other trust).

When you cannot trust your ISP and your local authorities those 'VPNs' can be useful. But I have more trust to my ISP I have a contract with and my country legal system than in some exotic company in some tax haven or other country that our consumer protections or GDPR obligations won't reach.

Back to the topic:
I do not believe that all VPN services are owned/funded by governments, but some may be. I don't have much reason to trust them, they are doing it for money and not necessarily only the money their customers pay them. In fact I trust my government more that some random very foreign company.

Fun fact, TOR was created by the US navy.

Why is “governments” the boogeyman that comes to mind? Scammers and thieves would have much more interest in your everyday consumer internet usage.

No, but VPNs are a false illusion of privacy. When you use a VPN, you're really just shifting your trust from your ISP to the VPN company. And governments can just force both to give them the data they have about you

I feel that if your government really wanted your secrets, they'd just send goons to your house to beat the fuck out of you.

I have a VPN to protect me from nosey bastard piracy lawyers.

Generally speaking, governments aren't that good at keeping secrets at scale. Government-run VPNs would require a lot of people doing coordinated work; data center employees, ISPs, people passing themselves off as independent auditors, legal teams, marketing teams, and more. The more people you add, the less likely it is to be kept a secret. And all of this across multiple VPN companies (because there's no guarantee that the person you want to surveil is using the one you own) and internationally (many VPNs are based in or have major operations in multiple countries).

Now, is it possible that the NSA has an undisclosed financial stake in one or more VPNs and has secretly inserted a backdoor? Sure, anything is possible. But is that more likely than them just buying up Ring doorbell footage or doing large data analysis on social media activity? Or installing rootkits on your smartphone firmware? Or just good old fashioned LoJack?

If they have reason to investigate you, they're going to probably get everything anyway. No reason to make it easy for them by not using a VPN.

Yes i guess most of them could be but i don't think proton is because they are open source and comes under swiss law just to be safe use tor.

Sure, it what’s your threat model?

Even assuming a VPN is a government surveillance device …

• It protects me from surveillance by my ISP. This is the big one
• It protects me from other corporate and scammer surveillance
• It protects me from law enforcement abuse/overreach - however my data was obtained would not meet evidentiary standards

For commercial offerings this is probably true for at least some of them, but creating your own VPN isn't terribly difficult if you are serious about your privacy. I typically just use them when I travel to countries like China where I can't get to a bunch of necessary services, so I don't mind if they route my YouTube traffic through CIA headquarters, but if I was doing anything more than that I would just set up my own.

VPNs provides limited privacy and some security. For example, your traffic might be correlated to the traffic exiting at you VPN provider if enough netflow data is collected. Theoretically data from your ISP and your VPNs ISP would be enough. Today, countries and their agencies are probably collecting/trading enough netflow data for this purpose.

As a rule of thumb; since companies these days are very keen on getting in to the data trading market; you can safely assume that most of them has access, if it is legal.

Only one I'd trust is mullvad

VPN companies actually use user created genuine traffic to hide bots and web crawlers and scrapers. That's part of why their VPN's are that cheap, they use your traffic to hide more expensive to buy bot traffic.

I believe protonvpn is no log. I hope they make their servers ram only like mullvad eventually though, it would be a great improvement.

Either you give your browsing details to the VPN provider or someone else. It’s never really private. I just have a VPN back to my home network. My ISP sees all my porn surfing and I don’t really give a fuck.

This is the prime schizo theory about TOR, but realistically they would need to own every exit node to get you.