this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
-133 points (6.0% liked)
Privacy
30856 readers
705 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.