If so, can you explain the value aside from changing location for streaming?
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.
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.
Sorry, I still don‘t quite understand. So if I don‘t trust my ISP, why should I trust a VPN provider? Doesn‘t the vpn provider get the same metadata?
I’m not saying you should trust every VPN provider. Some have shown to be nore trustworthy than others. Police have raided their datacenrers and not gotten anything (no logs). And they have gone to courts and said they don’t keep that info. However if you don’t trust your ISP, and purely use a VPN, the only info your ISP will get is that you use a VPN. Your encrypted bank packet that they saw before is now an encrypted vpn packet. The vpn will see the encrypted bank packet, but youmre right, you have to trust that they have more to gain by not looking and selling than they gain by selling your info and losing customers.
Thanks for the explanation
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.
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?
The legal thing you’re doing today might not be legal tomorrow – and there’s potential for you having been recorded doing that suddenly illegal thing in the past.
I have nothing to hideI have nothing to hide TODAY
Just my use cases:
- Piracy
- I don’t need my ISP knowing everything I do regardless of legality.
- I don’t need dickhead network admins knowing everything I do on their network, regardless of legality.
- I don’t need every website knowing my identity regardless of legality.
- newpipe always takin’ 'bout some goddamn “sign in to confirm u no bot” and hell no I’m just gonna reroll my location and oh look that worked.
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.
Yes. Personalized pricing relies on harvesting data. Don’t get played. Hackers and scammers rely on getting data on you. Don’t give it to them.
And everyone has something to hide. Do you have cancer? An STD? An affair? Those are all legal, but depending on the circumstances, you might get fucked if the whole town knew. Protect your data.
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
Beautifully said. Every time someone brings up the “nothing to hide” argument it always pisses me off, yet I’m often not able to put into words properly why I feel about it this way
Everything you do in the internet is being shared with data brokers who then sell your info and you dont get a cut!
Some things should be private. Some things should be secret. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, but simply because they’re yours and you want to keep them that way.
When Nazis take power, everyone has something to hide
But yes, protection from compromised LANs or public wi-fi
Back in the days before cell phones, when landlines were ubiquitous, people in more rural areas had what they called “party lines.” It was a single telephone line shared between multiple houses. You knew which house an incoming call was for based on the ring pattern. Your neighbors could also pick up the receiver, very quietly, and listen in on your phone calls if they wanted too.
Party lines are long gone but Internet communications have their own ways of being “listened in on.” A lot of traffic transmitted over the Internet is encrypted; with TLS for instance. But, some of it isn’t. If you use traditional DNS – UDP over port 53 – everyone in between you and the DNS server can see which websites you’re visiting.
I’m not concerned about my privacy because I have something to hide. I’m concerned about it because my personal business is my business. Not anyone else’s.
