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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Google’s unbelievably aggressive BS is the just about the only reason I run a VPN. Despite taking extraordinary steps to block them, Google still manages to regularly shove their BS into my life.
Google removed “Don’t Be Evil” from their mission statement for a reason.
😂
Our local druglord is offering drug protection for kids at schools! Yey! And at $5 bucks, their service is way cheaper than the war on drugs that the cops keep peddling!
Before I can get the kids to their first drug training, I gotta get the truck fixed, and what better way to do that than Joe? Joe may be the drunkest one eyed blind rheumatic paraplegic mute there is, but he’s kept all our cars running pretty good since that one time we accidentally ran him over. The car was making a noise and then it was just fine. Since then we go to Joe’s for regular maintenance. Well, it’s the alley behind Joe’s actually. It might not last, Joe seems to be getting slower and slower and much less talkative. Like the first time we ran him over, he was just blasting his mouth off. Last time he fixed my truck he wasn’t moving around as much and there were more flies around him than usual. Anyway, Joe is the way!
And don’t let Google trick you. They just want more of your data.
They’ve had one for years. If you use one of their phones or have their MVNO service you have had access to it. Might have even been turned on by default. Just a heads up.
Going to hijack this comment but just to let you know you can also download the application for Windows as well.
If you scroll to the bottom of the page where it advertises Google VPN you’ll see this link.
https://dl.google.com/tag/s/appguid%3D{A1F022B1-145B-4EBF-9752-95B413C837A3}%26appname%3DVPNByGoogleOne%26needsadmin%3Dtrue%26lang%3Den-US%26ap%3Dprod/google-one/VpnByGoogleOneSetup.exe
Oh gooodie! When can I sign up to gift more data (sarcasm)
A google VPN sounds as sus as huggies condoms.
Fucken hilarious since I’m currently dealing with newborn. Granted, huggies diapers have held back huuge poops.
Haha same here. Huggies FTW.
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I make my own VPN, so no thanks. Not going Google haha
What do you mean that you make your own VPN?
Explain more, please. Isn’t your name still attached to the VPS 's IP address because of the account you have to open?
Ah, you want to anonymise your traffic using a VPN?
You should be looking at Mullvad - they accept payments over Monero.
I’m just trying to keep the likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook from knowing my real IP. If I had something that required absolute confidentiality, I’d be using TOR over bridges.
This is an excellent chain of posts from absolute gods in the digital privacy game: The paranoid schizophrenic’s guide to opsec - an extremely entertaining read if you have the patience to follow their techniques.
Cheers
Nice. Thank you for the extra information.
Vps?
Virtual Private Server, a virtual machine with a hosting provider
What provider do you recommend? I’ve been looking for a VPS for playing around with some stuff that I can’t run on my OSX server.
Somebody mentioned Vultr. I’ll add Linode, Digital Ocean as the bigger players. Obviously, there’s the Cloud providers like AWS, Azure and GCP.
If you’re on a budget/looking for the best value, look at Contabo, Hetzner (bit of a pain now, their processes and uptime) and Racknerd special deals on Lowendbox (can’t beat this, but remember that you get what you pay for).
Vultr is good, IMO.
I’m surprised they didn’t offer one already
They have, for years. This isn’t new.
I blame the post title then
Google does a great job from being tracked by other companies.
I’m super confused by the FUD spread in nearly every comment here.
Pretty much every argument boils down to “we don’t trust google does what they say”, which is funny because I’d like to challenge anyone to provide evidence that google actually sells any of your data. They sell advertising slots that they promise will find the right people, but your data never leaves google. No advertiser gets to see it.
This VPN service promises and has been independently audited to never log or analyze your traffic and even has built in provisions to anonymize your traffic within Google so they can’t reconstruct it.
So apart from the questionable assumption that google is blatantly lying, what’s the argument here? Apart from maybe missing some popular VPN Features like country selection.
Also this is for people that already pay for Google storage anyways, so I don’t see the problem for the intended target audience, it’s sticky an improvement in privacy for them and they get it for free. It sure as hell beats getting your traffic intercepted and ads injected into random http pages like some ISPs do.
Anecdotally: i got Google VPN free w my Google one sub, used it to pirate some movies. still got a warning from Comcast (for one of the star wars movies, iirc).
Went right back to Mullvlad. Speeds were better anyway.
They don’t sell directly. But they sure sell.
This explains it better: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/google-says-it-doesnt-sell-your-data-heres-how-company-shares-monetizes-and
Of all the replies, this is the first one to actually make a good point instead of random google-bad handwaving.
Thank you
Apple provides exactly the same service(s) and now with their advertising division, ad slots to the higher bidder too.
But they are portrayed as Jesus while Google is Lucifer.
The default has become Google = bad. It’s also fashionable to blame them for all evils . 🤷
I won’t be using their VPN because I already paid someone else for a 3 year plan, not because Google is bad.
I don’t like Apple either.
Google is an ad company first, and everything else later. There are countless examples of them pushing tracking technologies that nobody wants - AMP, FLOC/Privacy sandbox, manifest v3 to kill adblockers. The list is just too long. At this point, any argument in favor of Google is just astroturfing.
Bruh, I can go to cybersecurity school, study it for a lifetime, audit this service myself, find that it does anonymise and does everything right, and STILL refuse to use it, simply because this just isn’t who you get a VPN service from.
You don’t buy your meat from the town gravekeeper, atleast not as long as there are other butchers, and especially not if the meat comes cheap.
So your argument has nothing to do with the product itself and everything to do with “hurr Durr Google bad”.
Which is fine, and a valid opinion, but has nothing to do with the product.
I’m annoyed because 90% of the comments here imply or outright state that google will use this data for ads or other means, which has no basis in reality.
You sound an awful lot like an abused spouse
“Oh sure, All those other times were bad, but she swore she wont hit me this time… and she means it this time, honest!”
My man, this is nothing like an abused spouse, dubious fart
Terrible analogy
It has everything to do with it. If you had money and needed to, would you buy a Porsche from a dodgy backstreet garage that had so many red flags on the way in?
Trust is everything. If I don’t trust you, why would I believe your marketing bumpf?
Why are you shilling for google in a privacy community, anyway?
It’s the basis of their entire business model???
THIS IS A PAID SERVICE.
Dude, they don’t only do ads. Google has a whole bunch of payed-for services that are never touched for ad-tracking. This is one of them. You are implying that Google Cloud would also use ad-tracking based on customer data, which is absurd.
Please stop spreading this FUD. Just because the free services are payed for by ads does not mean that everything they do is.
(edit: Paid, not Payed)
paid*
sorry
No need to be sorry. English is not my first language. I appreciate the correction.
So question. If google puts the tracking in chrome like they are supposedly going to do. The vpn won’t protect you (assuming you use chrome)… they don’t need to snoop on it, they already have it from another source.
No VPN ever protects you from ad-tracking. Like literally none. That’s not what they are for. VPNs protect you from someone intercepting your traffic on the way to the websites you want to visit. It protects you from malicious public wifi or a malicious ISP. It does not anonymize you in any meaningful way.
Addition just to explain: Google is tracking you on the website you visit, with the help of said website. So no matter whether you use a VPN or not, if you visit that website with or without a VPN, with all the fingerprinting that happens nowadays, they would probably just get a datapoint like “Oh, user X just moved from home internet to VPN” and that’s it.
Like it literally does nearly nothing if you don’t ALSO do 100 other important things to anonymize yourself. A regular user has nearly no chance to stay anonymous the moment they use a regular browser and a VPN would not help them at all.
@exi
What do you make of PIA MACE?
https://helpdesk.privateinternetaccess.com/kb/articles/what-is-mace
@Modern_medicine_isnt @privacy
So what, they can trap more information to present you ads based on your browsing habits?
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Imagine trusting a corrupt mega corp lmao