Comment by dgrove | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dgrove | Hacker News Reader

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You're not inherently trusting your VPN service to: a) not track you b) not keep logs c) not disclose this information to your actual ISP

You're also now just sitting behind whatever ISP your VPN uses which knows everything you're doing and sells it back to who-ever.

If your not rotating your VPN services that still allows you to be tracked via that IP. At the end of the day all your data still belongs to someone and can be used for whatever. Until DNS over TLS is complete and rolled out across the board your metadata can still be used.

Not to mention all of the other things associated with this. Even being connected to a VPN via your phone will still leak information like your coarse location, wifi networks and bluetooth beacons nearby which all get sent to your primary phone carrier and whatever applications you use.

No VPN:

- ISP has your name and history. The AdTech knows your IP's history, and most likely your Id.

VPN:

- VPN has your history, but no name (paid via voucher), and is other country's legal entity. My ISP only knows I'm using some VPN service (DoT enabled on my router). The AdTech is missing key identifier, IP, to link your data together (to aggregate).

> ISP your VPN uses which knows everything

Both ISPs know squat, just encrypted traffic from my real IP

And all of your DNS traffic since it's not over TLS

Cmon, all DNS queries go via VPN tunnel.

...And are trivially demasked for your VPN provider's ISP by traffic analysis (DNS requests are pretty obvious when transiting a VPN, then wait for the VPN provider to forward the packet).

Do you truly believe that a VPN provider with access to all of your traffic has no idea who you are? If so, you either have truly impressive opsec or are not considering just how much can be gained from traffic analysis.

Leaving aside the giant DNS question, there's SNI to consider as well as the VPN provider knowing your source IP and times of access. Then, because you're on hn, consider what the graph of little-used services you (probably) use says about you. Work VPN/chat/webmail servers? Admin interfaces for side projects you work on? And of course good old fashioned typos in your shell.

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