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Comment by Last5Digits | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think VPS providers wouldn't be interested in extracting your data? Whether you use a VPN provider or a VPS provider, it's always going to depend on the company whose service you are using.

Pick a cheap, untrusted VPS provider and you're getting just as exploited as if you were using a cheap, untrusted VPN provider.

It's also trivial to map the traffic of your VPS to you, since there's a 1:1 relationship between the IP your VPS uses and your actual IP.

Additionally IP lawyers may have much more success in threatening litigation to get your provider to rat you out. The provider would get little reward from not doing that, since harboring torrenters is probably not their main business.

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>Why do you think VPS providers wouldn't be interested in extracting your data? Whether you use a VPN provider or a VPS provider, it's always going to depend on the company whose service you are using.

The presumption is that the business of VPN providers is fully based on providing privacy, giving them a strong perverse incentive to abuse their access to this information and for whichever purposes. Plus, their whole infrastructure is orientated towards providing VPN services, with their own software, making the effort involved in collecting their customers' data and behaviour much smaller and more scalable.

VPS providers, on the other hand are in the business of offering hosting. What software their customer chooses to use on their VPS, and for what purpose, is anyone's guess. While the VPS provider could technically log and exploit the incoming and outgoing traffic from customers who happen to be running VPN software on their VPS, the effort involved in handling the myriad of bespoke VPN setups used by such a small proportion of their customers would be utterly pointless.

What purpose would this information be uniquely useful for? I don't think ad networks have some exceptional interest in what you torrented or what porn sites you visit.

If you're implying that they'd do something illegal like blackmail, then I don't think that would be a wise course of action for a company to take. VPN companies are, in the worst case, still limited by TLS. So the amount of blackmail material is pretty small,meaning they would be taking a massive risk for very little reward.

A VPS server can easily log your connections. All they'd need to log are incoming packets to your VPS, and the destination address of outgoing packets from your VPS. No need to concern themselves with what software you are using under the hood.

I don't really believe any mainstream paid VPN provider would do this. What I'm arguing is that, if you do worry they may do this, a VPS is a safer bet as it's much less likely that the provider will even bother.

For an analogy, if your motivation for using physical storage space was to hide your stuff from prying eyes, but were legitimately concerned that a business may have an economic or political incentive to take a peek, what would be a safer bet? Would it be to use a business specialising in storage, that uses standard storage modules all in the same location, and who knows most of its customers are interested in hiding their objects? Or would it be to rent an apartment from an estate agent that rents out all sorts of property for any number of purposes?

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