this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
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I always have a VPN enabled
I guess that would make sense in a country with incredibly restrictive internet laws or one that requires to report known crimes to the police/government.
The reason why I asked is because I'm skeptic of this, HTTPS (which is also what your Lemmy instance uses, as well as just about every website and application) uses that same encryption. If your VPN provider requires you to give your name, address, phone number and pay by credit card, they likely know more about you and you're likely less anonymous than with your ISP. So in most countries, using a VPN moves the trust from your ISP to your VPN company arbitrarily.
That said, there are definitely very anonymous VPN providers, and countries where using a VPN from another country makes sense.
I use IVPN which requires no knowledge of the customer and their payment options. If I can eliminate any form of privacy invasions I will take it. My ISP and DNS provider do not need to know anything about my habits or values as their service I pay them for is internet.
Okay that's good to know!
Sorry for my caution, but I've seen too many people, even in my country with good privacy laws, “anonymise” their online activity using a VPN provider like Express or Nord that required them to fill in even more personal data than ISPs are allowed, here. When using Nord's trial, I also noticed they send usage data of the PC and Android applications to a Google domain. I'm sure others do this, as well. Basically, they didn't assess their threat model nor how the proposed solutions approach their threat model, they just bought into the scaremongering of those VPN providers' advertising tactics.
That said, there are good reasons to connect to a VPN depending on your country's laws and the type of online behaviour, and anonymising services such as VPNs that do keep you anonymous (Mullvad and Proton require little to no personal information, and allow you to pay by Monero or sometimes cash)
I've just grown a bit skeptic of people always connected to VPN, is all.
I can't work out if this is well intentioned ignorance or trolling, so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and a serious answer.
The first point is there are a huge number of threats to privacy and your online and data security from connecting to the internet even in western countries.
VPNs are not just for protection from govt abuse, in fact their efficacy there is far lower than for several other use cases.
If you're in the US (for example) and with one of the biggest ISPs then every DNS request being made is (was anyway, I assume still is) logged and your internet usage is then sold off to data brokers to profile you.
So yeah, dont trust your ISP, and if you're dealing with a VPN that wants all that info then find a better one (proton or mullvad for exampke, you can pay with monero or bitcoin or even cash by snail mail)