It’s only logical it’ll go up in search trend when something is banned but regardless it doesn’t change the fact they can and will use your data to make profile to sell. Idk why people upset and downvoting like I said something grotesque
As a Network owner, which a VPN owner would ultimately be, they can see the ip’s and DNS requests that ultimately leave their headend to reach the actual service you requested, they may not know precisely which user requested what, but with an uptick in sign ups, there will also be an uptick in load on the network, the network engineers could then easily see what traffic has increased out of their headend locations to what ip’s/DNS names. If suddenly they notice that there’s a much larger count of requests from the headend to say pornhub, then they could reasonably assume those new signups are making those requests. So that at least is one scenario where they wouldn’t need to dig into individual traffic profiles to know who is doing what.
Though aside from that, every VPN is going to be able to see which IP reservation requested what traffic via their router and firewall logs, so any VPN you use could if desired identify which user who logged in at a given time did what. It’s a matter of if you trust that org to do the minimum with that information. I think a release of their anonymous headend statistics similar to the highest level of Googles “what are people searching for trends” is fairly innocuous compared to releasing say by which state of the US what is their given VPN usage trend.
Appreciate the explanation, I do understand the sentiment that it is a very apparent observation based on a few different factors but that wasn’t what I was trying to bring to surface, simply wanted to say Proton is not the friendliest provider if you wanted anonymity.
I even appreciate their joke about “censored government” but hey to all their own.
Is this not them admitting they know your search history to a categorical sense? L data mining
They banned porn in the southern states of the US this week.
It’s only logical it’ll go up in search trend when something is banned but regardless it doesn’t change the fact they can and will use your data to make profile to sell. Idk why people upset and downvoting like I said something grotesque
As a Network owner, which a VPN owner would ultimately be, they can see the ip’s and DNS requests that ultimately leave their headend to reach the actual service you requested, they may not know precisely which user requested what, but with an uptick in sign ups, there will also be an uptick in load on the network, the network engineers could then easily see what traffic has increased out of their headend locations to what ip’s/DNS names. If suddenly they notice that there’s a much larger count of requests from the headend to say pornhub, then they could reasonably assume those new signups are making those requests. So that at least is one scenario where they wouldn’t need to dig into individual traffic profiles to know who is doing what.
Though aside from that, every VPN is going to be able to see which IP reservation requested what traffic via their router and firewall logs, so any VPN you use could if desired identify which user who logged in at a given time did what. It’s a matter of if you trust that org to do the minimum with that information. I think a release of their anonymous headend statistics similar to the highest level of Googles “what are people searching for trends” is fairly innocuous compared to releasing say by which state of the US what is their given VPN usage trend.
Appreciate the explanation, I do understand the sentiment that it is a very apparent observation based on a few different factors but that wasn’t what I was trying to bring to surface, simply wanted to say Proton is not the friendliest provider if you wanted anonymity.
I even appreciate their joke about “censored government” but hey to all their own.