21–30 of 228 posts
I think the bigger hole is DNS. Full-tunnel VPNs to primarily TLS-encrypted sites seems like overkill. Encrypted DNS plus an "HTTPS Everywhere" plugin should obfuscate enough info for most people without significantly affecting latency.
The solution to all of this is educating the population. VPN tech is cheaper and more likely to succeed.
Especially if the VPN Provider is a shell company of the NSA or CIA!
One thing I was wondering, beyond your own personal ISP, does this mean that the backbone providers, the Level 3's of the world, are going to get into selling data to advertisers? I was feeling personally ok because I use an ISP with a strong privacy pledge, but I wonder if their uplink is going to be selling my data. Though I guess it's less of a concern since the backbones don't have the complete personally identif…
No, they're not. The solution is getting strong, enforced laws that protect our privacy and punish those who break them. But for the moment, with advertisers viewing themselves as gods gift to the internet who think that all your information belongs to them simply by virtue of existing, and who will go to great lengths to acquire and store it all (for perpetuity), a solution is needed, and part of that is VPN's.
No, they're not. The solution is getting strong, enforced laws that protect our privacy and punish those who break them. But for the moment, with advertisers viewing themselves as gods gift to the internet who think that all your information belongs to them simply by virtue of existing, and who will go to great lengths to acquire and store it all (for perpetuity), a solution is needed, and part of that is VPN's.
One thing I was wondering, beyond your own personal ISP, does this mean that the backbone providers, the Level 3's of the world, are going to get into selling data to advertisers? I was feeling personally ok because I use an ISP with a strong privacy pledge, but I wonder if their uplink is going to be selling my data. Though I guess it's less of a concern since the backbones don't have the complete personally identif…
It would be costly to maintain the interception/analysis infrastructure required for such data collection.
I daresay it would cost more than what they would make off the data.
No, they're not. The solution is getting strong, enforced laws that protect our privacy and punish those who break them. But for the moment, with advertisers viewing themselves as gods gift to the internet who think that all your information belongs to them simply by virtue of existing, and who will go to great lengths to acquire and store it all (for perpetuity), a solution is needed, and part of that is VPN's.
How do VPNs protect you against advertisers?
A heads up: theres a really nice project called Streisand[1] which provides a multi-protocol VPN with very little effort. You can launch one on a cheap cloud provider (like DO, if their policy allows). [1] https://github.com/jlund/streisand