If so, can you explain the value aside from changing location for streaming?
While your ISP can’t see everything, they can see metadata. They can see which websites you go to, which social media you use the most, where you bank, where you shop, etc. How much do you think it would take for your ISP to sell that data? If you happen to live somewhere there are laws againat that, you are slightly less at risk. Fines are only a deterrant if they’re more than what’s being offered for your data.
That being said, this only protects you against your ISP or other purely ipaddress based info gatherers. Apps/social media/websites don’t purely use ipaddresses to track you.
Encrypt DNS
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure this just encrypts your dns requests. After DNS resolution, the traffic packet headers still have destination/source ip addresses and they can reverse dns lookup the ip addresses. Might make it require a few extra steps, but they’re the ones routing the traffic. Even your VPN traffic, they can’t decrypt what’s inside the packets, but they can see your traffic going to a known Mullvad vpn address in Norway or whatever.
Correct.
Took me a minute to find it again, but there was an excellent essay answering this question. From https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/ :
There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.
…
On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.
So using signal for benign chatting between friends is praxis? Nice
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MULLVAD-VPN. It’s cheap as chips, no signup, no sign in. Just an account code that signs you in. €4.5 a MONTH.
When Nazis take power, everyone has something to hide
But yes, protection from compromised LANs or public wi-fi
If you’re in the UK, suddenly being in a different country can be beneficial if you don’t feel like having your face scanned or giving away your credit card details before engaging in some self-care.
Or just see a fucking meme hosted on imgur
before engaging in some self-care.
Or correcting some hasbara bullshit on Wikipedia.
Yes. Absolutely. Privacy is for everyone.
You are assuming that the things legal and illegal today will continue to align with your morality. “I don’t do anything bad” only holds value while you and your governing body share beliefs.
What if tomorrow you disagree? Suddenly there would be a long history of potentially incriminating internet history associated with you. What if it’s for something you can’t even control, such as “using the internet while female” in a society that recently banned women from using the internet?
This level of paranoia shouldn’t be required yet look at the state of the world.
A VPN doesn’t just allow you to change your location. It’s a tunnel between you and someone you trust (a VPN provider). All your traffic shows up as originating from the trusted partners address do that it cannot be traced back to you. They offer this to lots of customers and if your VPN provider is worth their salt, anonymizes these interactions so that they can’t even tell people who did what.
As a private person doing nothing illegal, is there value in having curtains on your windows ?
It’s not a question of whether there are things I’d like to hide, and why I want to hide them. It’s simply a natural desire to only disclose my personal affairs to specific parties for specific purposes.
Suppose I go to the pharmacy for some paracetamol and they ask to see a list of all the people I’ve emailed in the last 6 months, or at the supermarket I need to share my search history for the last 6 months.
There’s nothing illegal or anything I would be really embarrassed about, but it would be absolutely absurd. That’s the way the modern internet is built though.
I use mine to maintain control of my home server while out of the house
Why not tailscale?
Tailscale is a VPN.
You are right, I took the thread as VPN in the more common sense
Unfortunately the common usage of vpn is as a proxy and not as a virtual private network.
I’ve used both and tailscale is definitely more better for this purpose, but the downside to tailscale is that it is proprietary and some day will enshittification. There’s no way they’ll keep being free the way they are currently free for private use.
Interesting
There’s value in real privacy friendly VPNs (think Mullvad), otherwise you just end up trusting some other, probably very shady actors with all your data instead.
Unless you need one for specific things like using free wifi safely, torrenting or getting around restrictions then there is not much benefit.
Most VPNs won’t even work for daily browsing as far as I’m aware. You’ll get hit with way more captchas and potentially just not be able to access certain sites because someone has either got the vpn providers ip banned temporarily on the site or the site bans IP addresses associated with servers.
Personally, for generic browsing, I’m not too concerned if my ISP can see the domain names I’m accessing. I, as you probably do, only use HTTPS everywhere so the domain name is the most they’ll know, but you can do some work to try limiting exposure with DNS over HTTPS (DoH), etc if you want to.
There’s also TLS 1.3 addition of ECH which further helps by hiding the hostname.
Of course your ISP will always know the IP address you send packets to, but that is an even smaller problem.
And my final note: just use one when you need to, I don’t think it’s necessary to have one on 24/7 at home like some people advise and NEVER use a free vpn or one of the more mainstream ones (mullvad is best, second choice is AirVPN).
Who do you trust more, the neighbor who closes their blinds or the neighbor running around house to house trying to look in everyone’s windows?
Privacy should be the default, not the exception.
You could be another user resisting surveillance, or another user contributing to it.
The choice is yours.
Here’s a free VPN: https://riseup.net/en/vpn
Yes, privacy should be the default. However, there is a limit for what is practical.
A VPN adds latency to your connection. It adds an additional failure point. If you don’t need it, why use it? Most people don’t need privacy at that level.
Additionally VPNs are not free.
For the ones that claim to be free, you have to remember that if you’re not paying, you are the product.
What privacy do VPNs provide to the average user when not doing anything illegal? Absolutely zero. You might claim “but VPNs hide my traffic from my ISP!” And it is true, but in doing so you expose it to the VPN provider. In the end, unless you operate your own network, you will have to tell someone where you are going. Using a VPN is just kicking the can.
Of course if your ISP is known for doing shady stuff and there is a VPN that you fully trust, it may be worth it.
But I swear the VPN industry has wiped people’s minds with millions of ads so they’re not thinking anymore.
You’re a useful idiot.
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Of course. Th legal things you do today can be made illegal tomorrow.
It’s completely legal for me to watch 70s pornography while drinking hard liquor and painting pentagrams on my walls and sacrificing small animals to Baal.
I’m not going to videotape it and show my grandmother.
Nothing to do with illegal, you want your privacy kept intact and your data to be your own. Data can be used in millions of ways to manipulate you, cheat you out of your hard earned cash and affect you psychologically. Don’t forget, many VPN’s are owned by the same companies that own the review sites and are about as trustworthy as an Israeli ceasefire.
https://cyberinsider.com/vpn-review-websites-owned-by-vpns/
https://cyberinsider.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn-cyberghost-pia-zenmate-vpn-review-sites/
watch 70s pornography
Ahh… Orthodox Muslim countries exist
drinking hard liquor
Ahh… Regular Muslim countries exist.
sacrificing small animals to Baal
Ahh… What is your definition of small?
videotape it and show
Hyperbolic for the average person.
You use VPN because you don’t want your ISP selling data about you to a data broker, and you don’t want your government to get that data for free.
Data about you, even if not about illegal activities, can be used to manipulate you.
“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him.”
It’s not about whether or not you’re doing anything wrong, it’s about how the powers that be can decide at any point that what you’re doing is wrong when it’s convenient to them.
Unfortunately we are living in times where even the most sane countries are getting to the point where completely reasonable things may be seen as illegal, or used against you, in the future.
It’s not unreasonable to imagine that insurance companies/banks may soon (if not already) buy your internet traffic to get a profile of you. If that profile matches some risk factors, higher interest rates or premiums could be a thing.
Even the UK has started flexing authoritarian lately with the Palestine action proscription and suppression of protest. There is certainly a trend in modern politics to try to track people online, and they are starting with pornography to normalise it, using CSAM as an excuse to enact more extreme legislation.
Immigration and border authorities are also beginning to expand digital backgrounds for travellers or immigrants.
It’s not necessarily about what is illegal today, in your current location, but it’s about what might be considered illegal or “bad” in the future and weaponised against you.
Don’t assume that your current situation will always be the case. The right to privacy is not for people to do illegal things, the right to privacy is to protect you against authoritarian governments if/when they may intersect with your life.
Even the UK has started flexing authoritarian lately
It’s wild to me that people think this is a new thing for the UK
Maybe it’s the parts of the internet I inhabit, but I remember seeing memes about there being CCTV Camera everywhere there going back probably about 20 years
It’s not exactly a secret that they don’t have the same sort of rights to free speech as the US
A whole house of their parliament is specifically reserved for essentially nepo-babies
Their gun and knife laws are restrictive enough that I’m pretty sure even the most ardent anti-gun nut could probably find something that they think is at least a little excessive if they really looked into it.
Every few years I hear about them trying some new way to restrict who can access what on the Internet.
I haven’t heard it much in a while, maybe because of brexit, but for a while it sure as hell seemed to be like a lot of people from the UK were talking about people from countries like Poland in much the same way Americans talk about Mexicans.
It’s not exactly an accident that books like 1984 and v for vendetta were written by British authors and set there. Or that punk became so big there.
Look, I’m in the US, I don’t have a whole lot of room to be throwing stones here. A lot of my criticism applies to stuff going on here too. But it certainly doesn’t surprise me that the UK is skewing pretty fashy these days. That writing has been on the wall for a long time.
There is a very big difference between having restrictive laws which enable society to operate more freely, laws which have significant protections in place to prevent misuse, and laws which impede freedoms.
As well as the implementation of said laws by governments.
It’s certainly not a new thing, but the status quo has shifted drastically in the past 5 years especially.
For example, the laws which are being used to quell protest have been around for 20 years and longer, it’s just that last year was the first time they have been abused in that way. (As critics of, for example the terror act, suggested it would be)
My point isn’t that it’s the first time the UK has seen authoritarian skews in government. Churchill set the troops on the miners, Thatcher used secret police against the unions. The point is that the paradigm is shifting back to that, and eroding what has been slowly and painfully won.
