Comment by SXX
8 hours ago
But what privacy do you think majority of people who not doing something badly illegal expect from VPNs?
Most likely these people just look to hide their torrenting, saying political shit on Twitter from employer and not share their choice of porn with local ISP. Also just adding one more layer between them and occasional scammer who can sometimes infer more broad geodata from their IP leaked from yet another database. Oh and now to avoid "Show your ID" page on the same porn sites.
It works well enough for this goal. Not everyone needs NSA-proof solution.
PS: Obviously more tech savvy people understand importance of hiding traffic on public WiFi, but I doubt average Joe the VPN user will buy VPN for this.
Source? Why not “I don’t want to get profiled”?
We're talking on website with one of highest concentration of tech savvy IT professionals, programmers, cyber security experts, etc.
What percent on people on Hacker News who say they care about privacy live without Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook accounts?
How many people outside of HN do you think care about privacy for real? Like about adtech surveillance and not about their naked photos leaking?
I doubt either % is very high sadly. We tend to say we care, but very few people actually do anything or use self hosted solutions or not tied to Apple or Google ecosystems.
I mean, there’s a lot of products out there marketed around privacy. I really doubt the HN readers are the sole source of income for all these products… I do agree, it’s a minority, but within the VPN using population, I don’t think it’s a minority. Average Joe watching porn doesn’t give a shit about someone knowing about this (except, and that’s new, if you’re lucky enough to live in a place where VPN has become mandatory for this).
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The mass surveillance industry doesn’t rely on ips or even cookies to track you.
That seems like a huge bet. I don’t bet on this, I am careful about cookies and my source IPs.
Do you have any facts? I know they really on _additional_ stuff, but do you have sources showing that they never use cookies or source IPs?
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