Comment by jesterson
11 hours ago
> place of low-trust, your ISP, to a place of high-trust, ideally a trustworthy VPN like Mullvad
This is highly subjective statement.
Almost all commercial VPN services farm and sell your data. Just by that, my ISP is definitely high trust point while any commercial VPN is a low trust.
Your ISP farms and sells your data too.
Most VPNs are untrustworthy, but unlike ISPs, you can choose from any VPN provider in the world, not just the two or three that are local to you. And there are VPN providers in the world that have been proven not to retain data by audits + actual court cases where the court determined that the VPN provider did not have the data authorities were seeking. Do your research and choose a court-proven VPN, it's that simple.
Deutsche Telekom in Germany/EU farms and sells my data? Any sources?
You probably won't find direct proof any more than you will find direct proof of any random VPN selling your data, it's just a given that commercial entities are liable to sell financially valuable data, and a list of all traffic, every website you visit and every service you use, tied to a specific identity is certainly financially valuable. Being in the EU doesn't change this; in fact the EU explicitly required that ISPs retain your identifying data with the Data Retention Directive, and though this was struck down after 8 years in court, many individual national governments immediately moved to impose similar requirements. I don't know if Germany was one of them but unless Germany has a specific privacy directive that goes beyond EU law I would see zero reason to place any trust in an ISP. In fact even if there was a law that's still not a reason to trust an ISP, because privacy laws are violated constantly; the most trustworthy source by far is a party acting opposite to the government, who has been investigated by the government and proven not to log the data that the government wants.
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Even if it farms and only stores your data (which it does) without selling isn't good. YMMV between EU countries but I think even torrenting in Germany is way less safe than eg. in Poland where nobody bats an eye.
I can easily pay for a VPN service with crypto anonymously. I can also use a VPN run by a company outside my country of residence and jurisdiction.
Neither of those is possible with my ISP.
Paying with crypto does something to deindentify you, but does nothing about your traffic. It's still being watched.
prepaid 5g sim cards and 5g modem.
Yes and 5G provider knows your exact location while VPNs can be easily chained.
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Make it a “tourist eSIM” for a good measure. Your phone will be in one country, your exit IP in another (because there usually use roaming).
That said, you might still want to use a VPN on top of that, depending on what you’re doing.
Could you please provide proof for such findings about eg. Proton and Mullvad?
Most ISPs have invested big bucks in Deep Packet Inspection
That just helps them classify the type of traffic. They're not breaking the encryption to see the actual content.
Now try saying that wearing some Russian or Chinese shoes.
> Almost all commercial VPN services farm and sell your data.
Citation needed.
I understand it's not up to your (or anyone's) level of belief, but I am in intimately familiar with their modus operandi.
For everyone in the industry it is le secret de Polichinelle.
I think they don't sell their VPN data, because if that ever came out, that would destroy their business. Selling the data would be far too risky for them.
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My ISP is in a communist country, they sell other products like TV boxes, cameras, clouds and have ads/trackers on all of their products too.
Should I trust my ISP than Mullvad? LMFAO.