Whenever a state in the US passes a new "we need your ID to watch porn" law, sales of personal VPNs must predictably skyrocket in that state.
He can barely work the Sky box never mind stream stuff from the internet, he got duped into thinking it would make him "safer" when in reality it just makes using the internet a lot harder as everyone flags your traffic as malicious based on the datacentre IP.
I occasionally fire up Mullvad when I’m on the go. I get blocked way more often when I use it
So has anyone behind random CGNAT.
Hi! /waves I use a VPN to stop my ISP from monitoring my traffic and selling my personal information. My VPN (usually) exits in the same "region" as my real location; I guess if I hit a geoblock I could look at that, but it hasn't come up.
Wouldn’t that address your concern?
Skipping the broader discussion of AI, the ridiculous amount of automatic and human impossible pattern, matching and correlation with seemingly harmless data is something that I don’t think we are equipped to fully comprehend.
The time at which I hit some meta CDN, seems harmless. Until combined with some cookie and some access time to some asset it uniquely identifies me to previously anonymized data.
So no, I do not think HTTP and a good DNS are enough.
But then how do you stop your VPN company from doing the same? You essentially have two ISPs now.
(Longer answer: This boils down to the weighted probabilities; if the ISP was meaningfully regulated such that it was legally restricted from doing certain things with my data, that might matter, and one should also play in the exact likelihood that either party is selling my data. In my case the weighted probability is wildly in favor of a VPN, but I suppose I can imagine situations where that wouldn't hold.)
They probably could sell my traffic, but I estimate it (based on vibes) as being less likely than for most other intermediaries
Yes.
> who has all the same incentives.
And no. The ISP has little to no competition or incentive to not sell my information, while the VPN provider has loads of competition and often has user privacy as a core part of their value proposition.
Besides - even if both of the did have the same incentives, one openly says they're selling my data and one says they're not. At worst it's a gamble between the VPN lying and the ISP telling the truth.
VPN companies are more trustworthy than my ISP. Many get third party audits and publish results. And if the VPN company and server are in a privacy friendly country, they are hard to subpoena. Individual privacy being the default is itself valuable.
This is leaving aside numerous other reasons like avoiding censorship or persecution or whatever.
But that said, on this point I do agree with the author: privacy improvements from using a VPN are marginal for the average user due to the now widespread use of HTTPS. Yes, your ISP can see which domains you visit, but that's about it. I'm curious if there have been any successful lawsuits or prosecutions based solely on domain access logs.
Side question: Anyone know of a gateway or self-host service which supports DNS over HTTPS relay?
i.e. it will accept vanilla DNS requests, but if it needs to forward requests, it will only do so to DoH / DoT servers?
The main reason they exist is to do grey market bypass of controls becoming media access. If you trust them to not do some grey/shady exploitation of your metadata, more power to you. Sounds foolish to me.
Ie, it's the use case where you Pirate all the media, and use a VPN as a security bandaid against anti-post-scarcity busybodies.
> Is there anyone whose primary use case for a personal VPN is not "Geofence bypass for region-locked content"??
There's no ethical difference between faking your location to bypass licensing and copyright and downloading a file via torrent to bypass licensing and copyright. Both are piracy.
"Are you downloading films from anywhere?"
"Huh what from Disney Plus?"
does that count?
Yes, in practically every jurisdiction. It’s wilful breach of contract, tortious interference with the content distributor’s licensing schemes and copyright infringement.
I also don’t think there is prosecutorial precedent for murdering someone with a sea cucumber; that doesn’t make it licit (or legal).
Laws only mean what courts say they mean. Besides that, I have simply never heard any argument of region bypass being illegal or otherwise illicit, and you haven't provided any evidence to the contrary.
INAL, but while this use case might violate ToS, the case law suggests that courts deem this to be fair use provided you don't breech other laws in the process (e.g, copyrights).
No it's not.
Tortious interference with a business relationship is no doubt what you're referring to here, but it's a long bow with multiple layers of indirection. It is "intentionally acting to prevent someone from successfully establishing or maintaining business relationships with others".
Miramax, as a content distributor, might license their content to Netflix.
You are a customer of Netflix.
Now say you are a customer of NordVPN.
For one, NordVPN isn't trying to prevent you maintaining a business relationship with Netflix. Nor is it trying to prevent Netflix having a business relationship with Miramax.
NordVPN may provide you means by which you can choose to be in violation of your TOS with Netflix. It's not acting to ensure you are.
Netflix doesn't have to -allow- this, hence VPN/proxy detection. But they have recourse, drop you as a customer, for you, the customer's, actions, not for NordVPN's actions. Miramax can't argue that NordVPN acted to interfere with their licensing scheme with Netflix.
No, but they could argue that the VPN user interfered with their licensing scheme. (If everyone in a region circumvented geoblocks, why would someone in that region pay for regional rights to that content?) They wouldn’t, because it’s not worth it.
I highly doubt you know the laws in every region globally. This may be true in yours, but it's not a good idea to make such blanket, objective statements online.