Comment by burnaway

4 years ago

>> If you need to hide all of your traffic from other users in your local network, you can accomplish that in a trust-no-one fashion by running your own VPN endpoint on a server you control which provides better privacy guarantees compared to a centralised commercial VPN whose business model will eventually involve selling your data (once user growth stops but shareholders demand continued revenue growth).

the privacy protection for most people using VPNs is required against their ISP and other actors looking to analyse their traffic, not users on the local network. a commercial VPN will be better for privacy due to the crowding effects, ie. large number of users sharing the same IP and protects against correlation attacks - it's much easier to trace the activities on your own VPN endpoint back to you. of course you need to trust the operators, which is as different question.

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burnaway

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Terry_Roll  4 years ago

>ie. large number of users sharing the same IP and protects against correlation attacks

Depending on where you are based in the world (see https://www.submarinecablemap.com) realtime throttling of vpn traffic can still identify a user and where they are going in some cases.

You can get a degree of privacy from visiting websites located on servers in big data centres, but nothing a search warrant couldnt find out retrospectively.

Just traceroute your journey inside a vpn to see where abouts you are going when connecting to a webserver anywhere in the world and workout the physical route you are travelling on the cable map.

Obviously the number of languages you speak also restricts where in the world you will be going online to a point and timezones can also make you stand out like a sore thumb if you visit a website when the locals generally arent.

I've identified (US) websites which can workout what DNS server you are using, so in my case, based in the UK if I swap from using a UK ISP dns to using another dns like quad9 in Germany, the (US) websites alter the content you can see, just on that single DNS server change.

There is no privacy!

  • npteljes  4 years ago

    >There is no privacy!

    I think this is a good message. In the same vein, there's no security either. All you can do is make your and your adversaries' life harder, and balance the different tradeoffs.