Your VPN Is Not Enough - Daily Blog 050
My previous post about VPNs had a lot of traction over the Fediverse. Thanks to everyone for all the support and also thanks to the readers that pointed out what I missed about VPNs. How they are inherently secure but not private in many respects.
They are correct; no one should use a VPN to become anonymous.
After those messages, I felt the need to set the record about VPNs and what you need to do if you are looking for the most privacy while surfing the web. Having a high level of anonymity takes changing many browsing habits, but over time will become second nature.
VPNs will not make you anonymous
A VPN is an encrypted tunnel between your computer and the internet at large. They exist to allow employees access to internal intranets of a company to do work remotely.
That's it.
They are merely a tunnel and not a means to keep your data/metadata private. Any VPN provider you use can see what you access, how often, and for how long. It's not hard either; I do this in my own home from time to time with a program called Wireshark; cause I'm a nerd.
Just being on a VPN does not make your data private.
This even goes for all the online tracking. Every profile and shadow profile about you based off of your metadata can still get linked to you because all that changed was your IP address. Your IP address is just one of many data points used to track you around the web to spy on, steal from, and sell you.
All your VPN does is hide your traffic from your ISP. They see data coming in and out but can't make sense of the gibberish. Even then they know where you are going as well.
They do this by selling you their specific router, pre-configured to use their Domain Name Service (DNS) servers. So, again, unless your a massive nerd like me and change your DNS your ISP can't see what you are doing but can still see where you are going based on the requests you make.
It's a valid point. VPN's all come down the people at the other end of the wire. I always change my DNS over. But then again. I realize DNS is probably a broken, legacy, system we won't need in the future.