A VPN introduces a new party who can harvest your data. It doesn’t avoid IP tracking, it just shifts it from your ISP to another entity.
You have to trust that your VPN provider’s claims of no logging/tracking are accurate, you can usually get fairly confident with research but it’s never 100%.
Edit: to clarify, I’m not trying to dissuade VPN use. It’s a still a great choice.
a foreign commercial company is the safer choice compared to ur local isp who is bound to handover ur data to ur government if they ask for it. plus there are plenty of good vpn providers who can be considered credible due to third party audits and them being open source
A VPN is still a good choice, in fact if you setup your own VPN on a VPS that is an even safer choice because then you (sorta) control the certificate used for encryption. True, your hosting provider could still obtain that cert if they really wanted to, and they still have the data on your IP using it and for how long / how much, but it would make obtaining your data a targeted attack.
But there are cons to setting up your own, such as misconfiguration exposing you, or just the setup time in general.
Would prefer a random non transparent proxy for that. Or just only use IPv6, and have your router rotate that every so often. And, of course, minimize traffic to bad websites.
Isn’t VPN a must-have to avoid IP-tracking without downsides of Tor (slow, Cloudfare etc.)?
A VPN introduces a new party who can harvest your data. It doesn’t avoid IP tracking, it just shifts it from your ISP to another entity.
You have to trust that your VPN provider’s claims of no logging/tracking are accurate, you can usually get fairly confident with research but it’s never 100%.
Edit: to clarify, I’m not trying to dissuade VPN use. It’s a still a great choice.
a foreign commercial company is the safer choice compared to ur local isp who is bound to handover ur data to ur government if they ask for it. plus there are plenty of good vpn providers who can be considered credible due to third party audits and them being open source
I mean, I know for a fact I shouldn’t trust my scumbag ISP. Most people fall into that camp here in the US.
What are the alternatives? I feel tor might be good, but I don’t want to overload the n/w with 1080p FreeTube videos.
A VPN is still a good choice, in fact if you setup your own VPN on a VPS that is an even safer choice because then you (sorta) control the certificate used for encryption. True, your hosting provider could still obtain that cert if they really wanted to, and they still have the data on your IP using it and for how long / how much, but it would make obtaining your data a targeted attack.
But there are cons to setting up your own, such as misconfiguration exposing you, or just the setup time in general.
The vpn use case is mostly when you have an internet provider that is actively monitoring you or accessing blocked content
The main use for VPN services is torrenting without getting nasty letters from your ISP.
You’re only shifting the tracking from your ISP and the target server to the VPN company, which is just as likely to talk.
No, I mean, if I want a website to not know who I am? Isn’t Brave or Librewolf with fingerprinting protection and a VPN a valid choice?
Would prefer a random non transparent proxy for that. Or just only use IPv6, and have your router rotate that every so often. And, of course, minimize traffic to bad websites.
What if your isp is stuck in the early 2000s and doesn’t support ipv6?
The same should work IPv4. Afaik it’s easier to rotate the IPv6 tho.
Some ISPs don’t allow you to manually notate ipv4 addresses. I once had a plan that would rotate daily. It’s been long discontinued.