Comment by SamuelAdams
3 years ago
This feels a bit like the Dropbox comment. Sure, open source tools exist that enable you to do things yourself. However there’s a large market for less-technical people (prosumers) who might pay for a lot of that complexity to be simplified.
And it breaks original purpose to use VPN: "privacy"
See I’ve never understood the privacy argument. Who are you trying to stay private from? If it’s your local ISP, sure that could probably work. But if it’s LEO’s and the VPN provider must comply with international laws, you’re really just changing the amount of paperwork someone has to do. If the American FBI wants to see access logs for a VPN provider in Switzerland, the VPN provider must respond and comply with a subpoena or court order.
I feel like people really need to think about who they’re trying to be private from before signing up for VPN’s.
Yes thinking about threat model is important. Some VPN providers like Mullvad have good track record to ignoring warrants, since they don't record. https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-...
from the websites themselves actually.
with a VPS as your vpn, reddit/google/facebook/whatever all see you from a single ip, one that might change even less then your ISP's, all of your alternative accounts will all share this ip as well, and 0 other people use that ip address. basically data collection and alternative account identification becomes dead simple because your ip is basically your universal id.
you stand out as an individual, part of the "security" with things like mullvad is that you share that ip
security in depth of course, fingerprinting and stuff still exist, but if you have such a clearly unique ip address you have 0 chance
Yes, your local ISP. So they don't send you copyright infringement letters about torrenting. And the American FBI doesn't really care about that.
Also your local network, like you need to use your phone's WiFi because you don't get a good cell signal at work, but you don't want your employer seeing your personal phone activity. Same as public coffeeshops.
Do you understand the privacy argument now?
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eh except I'm not saying I don't get why people need VPNs, I totally get that and have used several. The Dropbox comment was saying Dropbox is redundant. I don't feel that way at all about VPNs and didn't say anything like that.
I'm just saying there are workarounds that mean we don't have to be beholden to the Mullvads of the world if they drop this feature. I think we're basically one good blog post away from a situation where most people who need port forwarding can set it up themselves via ec2. If they prefer VPNs, and can find some that do port forwarding, more power to them.