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I’m not doing anything illegal, why do you care if I hide or not???
If we want to meet the original straw man head to head.
If you’ve got something you’re that worried about keeping private, go home, and break everything with a computer chip, a radio/network. Because if it’s not listening now, it’s only an update away.
How are there so many stupid people here already?
Why I just hand my browsing data over to my ISP (and so should you)
Why I let random websites have my unique location-specific identifier (and so should you)
That’s not how that works
How does it work?
Didn’t watch the video, but… Traffic is often already encrypted with TLS or other encryption & you don’t have to use the ISP for DNS. This would cover a lot of the data you would be discussing. Instead if using these advertized commercial VPNs you are giving the data to those corporations instead which is hardly better in many cases—luckily most of your traffic is encrypted with TLS & you don’t have to use them for DNS …which takes us back to the previous statement for concerns.
There’s still value in VPNs for a several online activities (censorship, piracy, activism, etc.) & threat models to certain folks, but assuming the ISP is the bogeyman in most common scenarios for non-niche use cases is incorrect—but it isn’t how these commercial VPNs are selling themselves. If the ISPs possess the ability to break TLS encryption we’d have bigger issues to worry about & VPNs wouldn’t help. I would assume the video goes in this route but chooses the clickbait title for views.
If possible, I don’t want my ISP to know, trade, and sell as little data about me as possible.
T-Mobile Employees Across The Country Receive Cash Offers To Illegally Swap SIMs
I know VPNs often exaggerate or outright lie, but they still benefit me in ways I consider valuable.
If it’s all encrypted & they don’t have the DNS requests, all they can see is that you sent X bytes to some IP which isn’t very helpful. Who’s to say these VPNs aren’t selling their data back to the ISPs anyhow?
3rd Party Audits
By who? Who is auditing the auditors? That’s not to say audits aren’t good, but when the code is proprietary, a lot of trust is required. I would prefer banking on solid, open tech which the TLS standard is. There is still use cases for VPNs, but outside like streaming piracy, you might be better served by the Tor network.
Encryption doesn’t mean perfectly hidden. Metadata isn’t encrypted for HTTPS iirc. And the ISP knows who your sending traffic to since they are routing you there and are usually your DNS. When connected to a good and trusted VPN, all that is hidden, your DNS can’t give away your location, and the only server you contact is the VPN
What metadata? The headers are as encrypted as the payload. That there was a key exchange between you & a server isn’t too useful.
“Usually” is a strong word for DNS as well since all OSs let you change it & the megacorporations like Google & Cloudflare have already compelled a lot of folks to use their DNS ta resolve faster since the ISP ones are slow (& the smarter, curious folks used that as a launching point to find other provider or self-host). Some platforms have even been shipping DNS-over-HTTPS to get around some of these issues (since the payload & headers are encrypted under TLS).
Why would you hand your browsing data to the VPN company? It’s just moving the problem.
Market competition still exists for them, so they actually have a reason to live up to their promises still
A) as others have pointed out this is a rather shit video
B) I fucking hate the “and nor should you” trend. Fuck off with what I should or shouldn’t do, just give me the facts and I’ll decide for myself.
Do ISP’s monitor or sell or pass on your data? Yes.
Do VPN’s? Depends on the VPN. Find one that doesn’t and can back that up with 3rd party audits and legal encounters.
So can a good VPN protect your privacy? No, not by themselves. A VPN is part of an overall toolkit to be as private as you personally would like to be. It can help protect your privacy, that’s all.
It’s really that simple.
I would encourage people to watch the video and form a conclusion based on that. The title is quite clickbaity (which you would expect from YouTube) and at least half of the video is solely a critique of NordVPN, often followed up with “but Mullvad is better”. He does make some worthwhile points but they are not universally applicable. Every country has different governments and laws; do not blindly trust the word of Americans because they likely do not know shit about your specific situation. For example, nothing in his video addressed Australia’s mandatory data collection and retention laws, or the multiple high profile data breaches that have occurred here in recent years.
half of the video is solely a critique of NordVPN
I don’t know how good or bad NordVPN is. I have never used it. But I never will. EVER.
You know why?
Because they paid so many interesting Youtubers to shill their stupid VPN service, ruined so many otherwise interesting Youtube videos and wasted so much of my time that I swore I would never give them a single dollar of my money.
I can’t stand advertisement and advertisers, and NordVPN has been truly heavy-handed. They’re not the only ones: Brilliant comes to mind too. They can all fuck off. They’ve achieved the exact opposite of what their ads was supposed to achieve with me: I’ll never patronize them.
uBlock Origin + SponsorBlock + third party mobile client is the solution.
Actually I use Freetube with sponsorblock on the desktop and Newpipe with sponsorblock on Android. So I mostly don’t see shitty sponsors anymore.
But my Formuler TV box - which runs Android - has some weird crashing problem with the default Newpipe player, so I have to use an external player (MX Player) which doesn’t have sponsorblock, sadly.
So whenever I want to watch Youtube videos on my TV, I have to eat some NordVPN shilling - at least a little bit, just time for me to grab the remote and skip it - and I’m too cheap to replace the TV box.
You could try Smart Tube which has built in adblock and sponsorblock and see if that works better on your android tv box
SmartTube works very well. The problem is, it requires a Youtube account to have subscriptions, playlists and the like. That’s a hard no for me.
What was the reason?
VPNs are centralized entities that can monitor traffic in bulk
My ISP, who I pay $100/mo for internet, tells me straight up that it monetizes my browsing data. I pay $5 a month to a VPN that ‘promises’ it doesn’t do that. Safer bet is the VPN. Even if they (VPN) sell my data, I prefer to spite the ISP anyway.
many ISPs over here offer a ~5-10% discount on monthly bills if you agree to have your traffic analysed for marketing purposes. the last time I signed a contract I had to explicitly opt out of that. the ISP providing internet to all of my landlord’s flats offers a similar deal when signing a contract, and 1. I’m willing to bet that my landlord has opted in, and 2. I have no way of opting out of that for my flat. I think I’ll stick with a VPN for the foreseeable future.
With a VPN you are just shifting the attack surface
from the ISP likely to analyze my traffic to a VPN provider who didn’t provide any data after being raided by the police because they didn’t store any
I would still not trust them as you have no control over what happens server side.
That is just as true of your ISP, who when raided by the police will happily send it all over in a jiffy.
Firstly, using a VPN ultimately consists in trusting the company providing the VPN service that it won’t be fucking around with your privacy. Considering that all your traffic goes through it, that’s a lot of trust to place in one company. And I generally don’t trust any tech company to resist the lure of selling your data for profit for very long in 2024 - even those that profess to be privacy-friendly.
Secondly, modern corporate surveillance doesn’t rely on IP addresses anymore. So if you think a VPN protects your privacy, it really doesn’t. All it does is tell Google et al. which VPN provider you’re a customer of - i.e. you’re giving them even more data that they don’t need to have.
That’s why I don’t even bother with a VPN. I only use one to evade geo-blocking every once in a while.
using a VPN ultimately consists in trusting the company providing the VPN service that it won’t be fucking around with your privacy. Considering that all your traffic goes through it, that’s a lot of trust to place in one company.
Is that any different than the trust we place in our ISPs?
I agree with you. I fully expect my ISP/VPN provider to sell my traffic data, but I don’t see the value in paying a VPN do to it.
Is that any different than the trust we place in our ISPs?
It’s not. Your ISP is probably selling your data, and your VPN may or may not do that too. Just assume everybody sells your data.
The difference is, when you leave home and you connect to a wifi, you start using another ISP. If you then lose the wifi and connect using 4G, you’re using yet another ISP. If you use a VPN, you funnel all your traffic to a single provider all the time. In other words, instead of distributing the risk over several potentially bad actors, you concentrate it on a single one.
Like I said, that’s a lot more trust that I’m willing to place in a single company that only essentially pinky-swears won’t put me under surveillance.
I trust my vpn provider, but I don’t trust my isp to not give out my ip. So using a VPN is obvious and I havent had any issues doing that for decades.
If your mindset is that you can’t trust anyone, then yes, doesn’t matter. But you can trust some of them. You need to know which ones have a history of caring about privacy and which ones are just advertised heavily.
But you can trust some of them. You need to know which ones have a history of caring about privacy
All I see in the tech world is the companies that have been caught red-handed doing shady stuff and those that haven’t yet.
You say you can trust some of them based on their history of caring: can you? What’s their history of caring other than how long they’ve sworn to do the right thing and haven’t been caught doing otherwise yet?
Like I said, tech companies don’t resist the lure of big data money for very long these days. If you think any VPN provider isn’t at least seriously considering monetizing the traffic you send them to make more money on you than the few dollars you throw their way every month for the VPN service, you’re deluded. I would never trust a VPN with all my internet traffic. That’s just too much of a risk.
Ok and if you don’t trust anyone, you don’t have any protection at all.
Personally I don’t trust any big tech companies, naturally. But there are smaller vpn providers like Mullvad that are trustworthy. They are never American.
Ok and if you don’t trust anyone, you don’t have any protection at all.
Correct. I assume I don’t, so I’m always super-careful not to give away any information I don’t need to give to begin with. Or I give fake information whenever possible, to pollute the well. For the rest, as the old saying goes, if it’s on the internet, it’s as good as public.
They are never American.
Agreed. If you have to trust a company with your privacy in any way, don’t use an American company. It’s not even their fault: they operate in a country that’s fundamentally dangerous for your privacy.
My email provider is in Norway. for instance.
