I saw an article claiming this within the past month or two. This may or may not be the same article. The claim it's making is that is that the defense VPNs provide against hackers on public Wi-Fi networks is made redundant by HTTPS. I don't know enough about the technical stuff to evaluate that claim, but it doesn't mention the privacy risk of your ISP monitoring your browsing habits. It's a significant omission, even if the author isn't necessarily lying.
VPN is basically a virtual router: you send all your traffic through the VPN server, and it makes it appear as though the traffic originated from there rather than your computer. The only thing the VPN secures is the traffic to and from your computer to the VPN server.
The main benefit of course is that this somewhat obscures the origin of network traffic. So if you access a glowie website the glowies have to find out from the VPN provider which of their customers was accessing it. So you would need some level of assurance/trust that the VPN provider was more trustworthy than your ISP.
However your browser also has ways of uniquely identifying your computer, so for the VPN to truly work you have to make sure you only access glowie websites using the VPN. If you ever access them using just your ISP you pretty much give the game away.
The original big market for VPNs was people who wanted to watch TV shows and movies that were available on foreign versions of Netflix. Or BBC stuff that was region-locked to the UK. People would find a VPN in the "correct" country and the service wouldn't know the difference (until they started blacklisting known VPN IP addresses).
If you ever access them using just your ISP you pretty much give the game away.
I don't trust any of the "big tech" sites either, and assume they share data with intelligence agencies. If you are logged in to those sites on any browser tabs while connected to VPN, they've already profiled you and can follow you across VPN/ISP connections. They can't read from your end but the website knows what you did.
Yes true: the "big tech" sites also have ways to track what you do on other sites.
If I were going to do something nefarious, it would be with a dedicated computer that I never connected to my home network and never logged into "big tech" sites using my primary account. And when I wasn't using it would be unplugged with the battery removed.
And even then there's the possibility they do some underhanded shit like try to fingerprint mouse movements or the way you type. Ever since I took this online quiz 20 years ago that asked regional dialect questions and tried to guess where you grew up and it accurately did so within 50 miles (and the runner-up guess was were my mom grew up) I've wondered just how much hidden information there is to be gleaned from how simply how we interact with the computer.
Hell you could probably fingerprint people with a bunch of "what color is the dress?" style questions asked as part of a captcha.
I saw an article claiming this within the past month or two. This may or may not be the same article. The claim it's making is that is that the defense VPNs provide against hackers on public Wi-Fi networks is made redundant by HTTPS. I don't know enough about the technical stuff to evaluate that claim, but it doesn't mention the privacy risk of your ISP monitoring your browsing habits. It's a significant omission, even if the author isn't necessarily lying.
VPN is basically a virtual router: you send all your traffic through the VPN server, and it makes it appear as though the traffic originated from there rather than your computer. The only thing the VPN secures is the traffic to and from your computer to the VPN server.
The main benefit of course is that this somewhat obscures the origin of network traffic. So if you access a glowie website the glowies have to find out from the VPN provider which of their customers was accessing it. So you would need some level of assurance/trust that the VPN provider was more trustworthy than your ISP.
However your browser also has ways of uniquely identifying your computer, so for the VPN to truly work you have to make sure you only access glowie websites using the VPN. If you ever access them using just your ISP you pretty much give the game away.
The original big market for VPNs was people who wanted to watch TV shows and movies that were available on foreign versions of Netflix. Or BBC stuff that was region-locked to the UK. People would find a VPN in the "correct" country and the service wouldn't know the difference (until they started blacklisting known VPN IP addresses).
I don't trust any of the "big tech" sites either, and assume they share data with intelligence agencies. If you are logged in to those sites on any browser tabs while connected to VPN, they've already profiled you and can follow you across VPN/ISP connections. They can't read from your end but the website knows what you did.
Yes true: the "big tech" sites also have ways to track what you do on other sites.
If I were going to do something nefarious, it would be with a dedicated computer that I never connected to my home network and never logged into "big tech" sites using my primary account. And when I wasn't using it would be unplugged with the battery removed.
And even then there's the possibility they do some underhanded shit like try to fingerprint mouse movements or the way you type. Ever since I took this online quiz 20 years ago that asked regional dialect questions and tried to guess where you grew up and it accurately did so within 50 miles (and the runner-up guess was were my mom grew up) I've wondered just how much hidden information there is to be gleaned from how simply how we interact with the computer.
Hell you could probably fingerprint people with a bunch of "what color is the dress?" style questions asked as part of a captcha.
This is why I use IPoAC to connect to my VPN.
11 minutes round trip is a very good IPoAC rate. Who's your ISP?
Lying by Omission is very much a real, legal-term thing…
Not sure if that’s what they were definitely intentionally doing, here, but it stands...