VPNs don’t help privacy at all. They allow you to substitute trust in your ISP for trust in a different entity. For some, that may be good, but for most others it’s a wash.
Going from "trusting" an entity that explicitly requires you to consent to spying when you sign up to trusting one which explicitly promises to protect your privacy when you sign up does seem like it would "help privacy" in most cases.
Why would I trust an entity that often has the legal backing to harvest my data and provide it to the government whenever they "deem" it necessary? The same government that has direct means of control over me? Whether it's the US, China, Germany, I think I'd rather put my chances with some private company that at least has financial and maybe ethical motivations (depending on the company) to protect my privacy. An ISP will only go as far as the law requires to protect it and who knows what backdoor deals are made with governments to subvert those same laws.
There is no realistic/helpful/useful legal process to sue over a breach of privacy. So my ISP being in my jurisdiction doesn't do me any good at all.
I think your logic holds up, but it's not quite as definitive as you say. VPNs are not the straightforward privacy upgrade that HTTPS is. (I don't think you were trying to imply otherwise.)
I think the picture improves if you choose more carefully. Choosing an established VPN that has a no-log policy and has been audited seems much better, because now multiple companies are putting their reputation on the line. On the other hand, I think a relatively unknown company that's reselling someone else's VPN and hoping to cash in on the "VPN = privacy" is only a slight upgrade over a major ISP.
[0]: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2021-11-12/column-int... [1]: https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/reports/look-what...
Or course they do, I'm so tired of seeing posts like this when really what you mean is that it's not perfect privacy and therefore you don't like it.
Let me compare an ISP spying vs a VPN spying:
1. You make DNS request about example.com. Your ISP sees this. Your ISP can see what websites you "might" visit.
2. You connect to 1.2.3.4. Your ISP sees this. Your ISP can see what websites you "did" visit.
3. You request some data and receive some data. Your ISP sees the size of the data. If it's not encrypted, it can also see the content. Your ISP can see (at least) the size of objects that you requested -- which is enough to fingerprint many specific contents.
Okay so not using a VPN gives effectively zero privacy. Let's look at a VPN:
1. You connect to a VPN (and let's assume your connection doesn't "leak" insomuch as now _all_ network traffic goes through the VPN). Your ISP can see this.
2. You make DNS request about example.com. Your VPN sees this and your ISP can see a network packet. Your VPN can see what websites you "might" visit, your ISP can't.
2. You connect to 1.2.3.4. Your VPN sees this. Your VPN can see what websites you "did" visit. Your ISP still sees traffic to the VPN.
3. You request some data and receive some data. Your VPN sees the size of the data, and your ISP only sees the aggregate-size of data across all of your sessions. If it's not encrypted, your VPN can also see the content but your ISP should still only see aggregate size. Your VPN can see (at least) the size of objects that you requested -- which is enough to fingerprint many specific contents. Your ISP will have a tough time fingerprinting content from specific websites.
4. Your ISP can note that you have a high amount of traffic, possibly note that the traffic is going to a known VPN destination, and that your "normal" traffic is now gone.
Now, your VPN can see all the stuff that your ISP used to see. In addition, your ISP can now determine that you might be doing something illegal, suspicious, or at the very least "enterprise grade" and demand more money.
Have you really gained more privacy?
There are vast numbers of vpns, so total coverage is impossible. They are also very likely to be in a different legal jurisdiction so it's non trivial to do.
So, yes, you have, by making yourself a harder target despite having the same amount of centralisation on your part
Now, sure, they could "just" delete logs, but their government can "just" tell them not to, or even tell them to live send the logs to them directly.
So it's really "which country's government you trust".
Mullad, OVPN are a couple.
What are your opinions on those? Not every country has laws like USA/India, which give the government free reign by citing certain Acts.
As such, we have dozens of ISPs with their own backend infrastructure, all sharing the same last-mile, and most available nation-wide.
That said, they're all going to be buying transit from a big backbone ISP to get overseas connectivity.
With your ISP, you appear on the internet as a residential IP that provides your approximate location and most likely doesn't change very often. The requests you make can be easily correlated by PRISM or any other middleman, or by any CDN running the websites you visit.
With a VPN, your exit IP is unrelated to your geographic location, changes very often, and hopefully it is shared among many more users.
GeoIP is only necessary when seeing a new IP. But once the IP starts to build a reputation, then the specific location can be determined. It's especially true if you buy something online.
My office: suburb of Chicago My home: downtown Atlanta My friend's house: just outside Phoenix The McDonald's free WiFi: Chicago A church's WiFi: Some random location in Arkansas.
I'm in North Texas.
Just a few examples I've remembered since making a point to test while I'm out.
Being able to choose to reveal data to Mullvad over Comcast or Verizon seems like a clear win to me.
At the very least i rob Comcast of my data. Which is my goal, after all. Not full privacy.
The problem is that it doesn’t actually change anything while giving a false sense of security.
Your VPN’s ‘improved’ privacy is just as worthless as the privacy you get with just your ISP. If something requires privacy, neither can be used, and if it doesn’t then why should it matter which one you use ?
Privacy is an on/off thing. Either you have it or you don’t. There is no in-between.
On top of that, I get the benefit of not being tracked everywhere on the web. Or if they are tracking me, they have bogus data. And I can set my exit server to a jurisdiction with more user-friendly privacy laws.
Also, what better place to tap traffic than the connection of a VPN provider.
Well, per my previous post, my ISP is definitely a better place. Hell, you don't even need to tap them. They'll just sell you the data, along with other PII. (Setting aside Mullvad' multi-hop support, which would require taps in multiple jurisdictions).
I think the point you're trying to make is that this isn't resilient to the NSA monitoring my traffic. I had hoped it was clear from my message that there's another level of privacy I'm concerned with related to intrusive private entities. I'm not expecting the GDPR or similar privacy laws to stop the NSA either, but they serve a useful purpose.
I guess I'm banking on Meta and Google not tapping Mullvad. Or even the RIAA or MPAA, for that matter. Because my ISP will very willingly give those entities data. And as long as unencrypted SNI is the norm, my ISP knows more than I want it to know about my browsing behavior. Not to mention the stuff that isn't HTTPS. Sure, Verizon knows I've established a connection an encrypted tunnel and how much bandwidth I routed through it, but that's a level of metadata I'm not concerned with.
So, yeah, Mullvad could be logging every packet through their tunnel. They could even assemble a profile based on my account and sell it to all the data brokers and advertising networks. They still don't have my SSN. Even if all of that happened, then I'm still no worse a situation than if I didn't use them because my ISP is doing those things. At worst, I'll be out 5€ for the month.
Where would you like to move the goal posts now?
I think you answered your own question.
I can feel the sarcasm dripping from this sentence.
The "Good" (VPN) is exactly as imperfect as it's complete abscence. There has been no improvement whatsoever. Literally, as far as Privacy is concerned, nothing short of "No one actor has the capability to sit on a full stream of traffic", will suffice.
Either you're MITM'd or you aren't. Use malicious postmen if it makes it easier.
If you have the same guy come, and all of your mail goes through him, he can reconstruct all conversational state.
Now imagine you get a different malicious postman at random every day. He eacesdrops on every packet, but he's not privy to which of his fellows is scheduled to get the next packet. Therefore, it's not practicable to MITM in any practical way. This all goes out the window when someone controls the malicious postman scheduler, of course, because then they can figure out a map of who to go to to reconstruct your conversation.
The above is the concept behind Tor, and why the only effective counter to it is to run a hell of a lot of entry/exit nodes so you can conceivably time correlate given enough consecutive probe points are hit.
That a nation could make a new device is arguable, that a nation could make a device that could be delivered without flying planes over another country is less arguable. Even nukes as they stand would only pose significant threats to certain parts of a country (there was a map floating around the web a few days back of areas of the US most susceptible to the - pardon the pun - fallout from a tactical strike.)
Yeah, of course not, that's not nearly the only reason to use a VPN.
But the information you leak towards your ISP or VPN isn't the only variable. With a VPN you leak less information to the services you interact with (e.g. your IP is hidden) which undoubtedly increases privacy.
> Have you really gained more privacy?
Absolutely, 100%, unambiguously, yes; my ISP openly says that they monetize my data, my VPN says they don't. I'm very happy to gamble that the VPN is telling the truth when faced with the expectation that the ISP is telling the truth.
As terrible as that is, yeah I feel pretty safe pirating movies using it.
But you're right that blindly trusting a VPN without doing any research might be worse than blindly trusting your ISP.
and my neighbours can determine I might be doing something illegal when I close my curtains, sure.
No, but you have lost less privacy.
The amount of loss of privacy you incur when some particular item of personal information about you is revealed to another party often depends on how much other information that party has about you.
The adversary is netflix or a IP rights enforcement company, and the user doesn't care what their ISP or a state could observe.
For what they are used for, they are fine. If you are worried about state or megacorp spying, the solution is less technical and more political.
They just replace your ISP with a VPN company. Which is the two is more shady is something you have to figure out, keeping in mind that a subsection of the internet just stops working or turns the aggressiveness of their anti-bot protections up to the maximum on a VPN.
It allows me to trust only my ISP instead of every ISP in various coffee shops.
since we're on the topic: how is it still a thing that vpn services are actively pitching content-block/copyright circumvention? Seems weird to pitch something as shady this loud and publicly? Reminds me of how weird I find it that trackers and illegal hosting sites have twitter accounts...
1. They keep your data safe from your ISP. 2. They keep your IP hidden to the sites you browse.
Those two clearly "help" privacy.
> For some, that may be good, but for most others it’s a wash.
That sounds less like "VPNs don’t help privacy at all" and more like "VPNs are helpful some of the time".
All SNIs are passed as plain text to your ISP/VPN, even with DoH/TLS secure DNS enabled.
Your personal solution seems pretty good though.
Unless your credentials leak, of course, but a security expert would have that same risk.