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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

You just replaced ISP tracking with VPN tracking

And your "VPN in YouTube ads" surely does that

I rather have my VPN track me than ISP does. For example, connection to Signal and Kakaotalk servers is used as an evidence of being a member of a terror organisation (!) in Turkey. Evidence is gathered by Ministry of Communications from the ISPs, whom they have to provide real-time connection data to the State including CGNAT records. With a VPN, it is almost impossible (depending on setup, i.e. NAT) to obtain such an evidence - especially for political purposes, even if the VPN provider willingly give logs, no way to prove that info is legit.

I guess it depends who your adversary is. If it's the Turkish government, then you are probably safe to trust a foreign mainstream VPN. If you're trying to avoid scrutiny by a five-eyes western government, you need to be somewhat more careful.

But that’s a general trueism in security. Whether your changes are effective depends on what and whom you’re trying to protect against.

> For example, connection to Signal and Kakaotalk servers is used as an evidence of being a member of a terror organisation (!) in Turkey.

And you are sure your connection to a VPN service won't get you flagged ?

I'm not paranoid, and I have no evidence of anything at all, but it does occur to me that if I ran the US CIA/FBI, I would totally start a company like NordVPN and give them enough money to advertise widely and get sponsor spots on popular YouTube channels.

Sure, you'll probably end up facilitating a few petabytes of copyright infringing torrent traffic every day, but you'll also have a direct connection to countless people who think they're totally anonymous.

> Sure, you'll probably end up facilitating a few petabytes of copyright infringing torrent traffic every day, but you'll also have a direct connection to countless people who think they're totally anonymous.

This is the best part really. No three letter agency is going to spoil their honeypot in order to bust some kid for downloading movies and video games. They've got bigger fish to fry. The more successful they are at keeping their users safe from the copyright goons the more popular and "trustworthy" their little honeypot will seem. Your downloads will still probably earn you another black mark in your dossier, one more thing they could use against you if you ever became a problem for them, but still, free movies, music, and games! Might as well make oppression work for you.

Most people who use VPNs for privacy will readily admit that their use is based on relative trust. They know that ISPs are notorious for harvesting and granting access to browsing data, and they trust that their reputable VPN provider of choice is truthful about their logging and internal data handling policies.

> You just replaced ISP tracking with VPN tracking.

Yeah, that's the point. People have infinitely more choices for VPN providers than for ISPs. The VPN provider could be in another country. You can even run your own VPN on hosted infra.

> You can even run your own VPN on hosted infra.

This comes with its own risks and you lose some advantages of a commercial service, such as being "lost among the crowd" of other VPN users.

What if you provision a new IP address every other week/month? i.e Assuming the provider allows it and the cost is negligible

If your hosting provider makes similar privacy guarantees to a similar VPN provider, then perhaps. For bonus points, use a hosted VM and commercial VPN in serial.

Again though, if the US Government is a potential adversary, there's still risk here. Intelligence services could have a 0-day on your linux distro, or an operative within the hosting company. If they get access, they can turn your hosted VM against you.

I think you just have to assume there's a possibility that the infrastracture can be compromised at any moment. For both of these two options. Guarantees from providers are valid until the day they are not.

Though a point has to be made about using a hosted VM for VPN purposes, you have some level of control about which specific software, configuration and encryption schemes etc. you want to use for your stack. Only downside is that currently there isn't sufficient hypervisor protection from the host kernel afaik.

However I do agree with you that either way, the risk threshold is too high if you are concerned about high level state actors. Neither commercial VPNs nor hosting providers can solve the "anonymity" problem for you.

> You can even run your own VPN on hosted infra

True. But we know very few people do that

So now you trust the infra hoster AND their own ISP.

You will always have to trust someone. Having more options when choosing who you trust is a good thing. Does that make sense to you?

You can choose your VPN. Your ISP, not so much. It's also possible to run your own VPN on a public cloud or VPS. You might still need to worry about your provider then, especially if a government might request who is renting the server that is sending certain traffic.

There are levels to trustworthiness. I mostly trust my ISP enough to not bother with VPN at home, but when I'm traveling I'll take my VPN provider over a hotel WiFi any day.

> You just replaced ISP tracking with VPN tracking

Huge benefit in my opinion.

I see a lot more ads for VPNs that I do for ISPs.

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