VPNs Can’t Make You Anonymous Online. Don’t Be Fooled by Anyone Who Says They Can

Comments

• Powderhorn@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  All I expect from my VPN is protection from my ISP seeing exactly what I’m doing and selling those data to advertisers. If true anonymity online is doable, there are far more steps to take to achieve it.

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  • I_am_10_squirrels@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    I2P seems like a better solution, but it doesn’t have a strong network yet

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    • Liz@midwest.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      What’s I2P?

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• Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Ugh. Tired of hearing people say this. No, VPN alone won’t make you anonymous online. But they are a mandatory part of an online anonymity toolkit.

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  • Templa@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    How can you be sure your VPN provider isn’t logging or getting information about your traffic?

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    • t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      You can’t be sure, but you can use providers and exit nodes that are based in places hostile to whoever you are trying to protect against.

      Also, functional anonymity can exist by different entities having different pieces of data that together would de-anonymize you, but who are unlikely to ever intersect. A good example of this is DMCA requests: if a copyright holder sees a US IP address on a residential Comcast IP, they’re going to file a court case and get a subpoena for the subscriber info. If they see a Hong Kong IP from a co-lo datacenter who would need to cooperate to tell them who owned that IP at that time, they’re not going to even bother because they don’t know how to even start filing a court case in China, and if your VPN has too much data it won’t even matter because no one will even have contacted them.

      It all depends on your threat model.

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    • smeg@feddit.uk ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Answered in the article:

      And you’re not anonymous to the VPN itself when using its services because you’re essentially swapping the visibility into your online activity from your internet provider to your VPN provider. That’s fine if your VPN has an audited no-logs policy and runs on RAM-only or full-disk encrypted servers to serve as an extra layer of protection.

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• Steve@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I’ve seen these kinds of articles a few times.
  I’ve never seen anyone claiming VPN = anonymity.
  Am I missing something?

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  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    There are people who get VPNs because they hear that they prevent your ISP from snooping on you when configured correctly, and just hear “no one can see what I do”, because that’s what snooping is, right?

    When I worked at a university IT dept, we’d often get content block hits for adult websites from inside the internal protected network, via the university VPN, because a professor or staff member thought a VPN would route their traffic ‘past’ us.

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  • Sxan@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    VPNs are part of an anonymizing solution. Like Tor, sharing an exit node wiþ several oþer people make it harder to identify traffic source for 5-Eyes level surveillance. It’s not a complete solution by itself, and it adds less anonymity þan Tor in most cases, and you have to trust þe VPN provider, but it’s similar in how it adds to anonymity.

    It definitely protects against some types of surveillance. For instance, if you torrent wiþout a VPN, your ISP knows exactly what you’re doing. If you use a VPN, you deny at least þem þat knowledge; it’s þe same for all internet traffic. VPNs add protection from ISP tracking. And sharing exit nodes adds more protection.

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  • Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Yeah you’re missing all the VPN ads.

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    • GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      Yes. Even the more reputable VPNs make ridiculous claims in their marketing.

      Like, if you’re worried about hackers stealing your credit card, you don’t need a VPN. You need a chill pill.

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  • GammaGames@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That’s pretty much their entire script whenever they advertise

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    • SteposVenzny@beehaw.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      All the ads I get are about getting the foreign libraries in streaming services.

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