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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 :)
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Some VPNs allow multi-hopping, similar to Tor. I couldn’t give you an exhaustive list but most popular ones support this. Mullvad and Proton do, for example. There are also strategies to add noise into VPN traffic.
This is not a silver bullet, of course. Tor has similar problems as you describe if an adversary has visibility into enough nodes. As always, this comes down to your threat model.
On the one hand, I find the advertising of VPNs outright dishonest. On the other hand, I would trust any reputable VPN provider much more than I trust my ISP or cell carrier.
Ivpn is one service that not only supports the use of tor, but they also invest in the tor organization and run a lot of nodes.
Their site is also a goldmine of basic to advanced level docs on serious privacy and security (free). Including detailed instructions for cresting your own anon servers, vps, etc. And how to use a VPN with tor properly.
They are quite serious about what they do and how they do it.
Can you explain? I’m curious
Sure. I’m referring to the ones that run big ad campaigns, like Nord and Mullvad. They tend to overstate how a VPN can protect you, sometimes in ways that barely make sense. There is no epidemic of criminals stealing personal credit card information over insecure wi-fi, for example. The ads play into ignorance and fear.
That said, yeah, I’d rather be on a VPN when on a public wi-fi network. But I’m not really worried about someone sniffing my encrypted HTTPS traffic (which is pretty much everything nowadays; Firefox by default won’t even load unencrypted web sites).
Mean nord, express and surfshark? Never see ad from mullvad.
Mullvad had a huge ad in Times Square this summer.
They have a big IRL ad campaign in major US cities. See https://mullvad.net/en/blog/advertising-that-targets-everyone
These ads certainly aren’t the worst, but they’re still a bit misleading. Using a VPN is not going to prevent tracking in general. Your phone apps will still send GPS data to all the same places. Web sites will still use all the same cookies. Facebook is still gonna be Facebook. 🤷
That said, Mullvad does include domain-based ad and tracker blocking with their DNS server (which is free and available to the public, btw), and that’s also optional on the VPN, so it does help to a point.
(Pinging @countrypunk@slrpnk.net to avoid double-replying. )
Mullvad runs big ad campaigns? That’s news to me.