I use Proton. But I continue to run into more and more websites and services that detect my VPN and refuse my connection, or just run literally 40 captchas in a row until I just give up.
I use Proton because it has a “suite” of products under a single subscription, but that benefit is losing it’s allure as some of their products are pretty shitty from a user experience perspective, their customer support is atrocious, and they don’t seem to pay any attention to what their users actually want.
Does anyone track known VPN servers? Is there a specific provider that causes less problems? Does anyone test different VPNs for detection?
Thinking about cancelling my subscription and moving to Mullvad.
If you’re trusting any other VPN provider, then you’re already willing to trust someone. What’s the difference between trusting Proton and trusting Digital Ocean?
If you’re only visiting HTTPS sites then your ISP already can’t snoop your traffic. A VPN gives you very little added privacy.
No matter what you use, you’re really only protecting yourself from your own ISP.
It’s not an issue of trust but of obfuscation. You’re sharing IPs with other users
Wrong.
Wrong again. You’re protecting yourself from having your traffic logged by the sites you visit. Every modern website is collecting this information and selling it to data brokers.
@[email protected]
VPN + Tor = incognitopottamus
You think that using a VPN is protecting you from the website you’re connecting to logging that traffic?
No. The website sees the traffic. The only thing they don’t see is your home IP address. That’s not even a useful piece of information for tracking someone. Home IP addresses are usually dynamic.
Websites track you through cookies and etags, and VPNs do not block those. If they did, you wouldn’t be able to log into any websites, and you would always be redownloading JS, CSS, and fonts you’ve already downloaded.
It is logging the traffic. It just prevents it from collecting my personal information in that log and sharing it with all of their data mining buddies.
I don’t even know how to respond to that, other than of course it is…
You assume that I’m not also blocking those things.
Do you not understand the difference between first and third-party cookies?
What personal information do you think the VPN is blocking? Like, exactly. Precisely what information do you believe the VPN prevents a website from seeing about you?
I understand the difference between first and third party cookies. You said you were trying to prevent the website from tracking you. A website’s cookie for its own domain is first party. If you block that cookie, it’s harder for them to track you, and also you can’t log in.
Your IP address is not very useful for tracking you.
The major ad trackers use cookies and etags to track you. They don’t use your IP address.
Do you not understand how a VPN works? It prevents them from collecting your IP address.
Then we agree that’s the only advantage. So your original reply is wrong. A cloud VM running self hosted VPN protects you exactly as much as a commercial VPN with regard to the website you’re connecting to.
No. You’re wrong once again. If you fire up a VPS and you’re assigned an IP, that’s still your IP, even if it’s running on a remote server. It belongs to you and only you. It is a personal identifier.
So just make a snapshot, and every time you want a new IP, create a new VM from the snapshot. Or if there’s an option in your cloud provider, just request a new IP.
Whenever you connect to a VPN, you use the same IP address the whole session. You have to reconnect to a different node whenever you want a new IP.
But I feel like you’re just being contrarian here. Your objections aren’t rooted in any sort of actual concern over privacy, and I don’t think you really understand the systems you’re using. In other words, you’re just being paranoid.
If you want true privacy, use Tor.
Also, please prove to me that you are blocking etags, because that is bonkers.
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You think that using a VPN is protecting you from the website you’re connecting to logging that traffic?
No. The website sees the traffic. The only thing they don’t see is your home IP address. That’s not even a useful piece of information for tracking someone. Home IP addresses are usually dynamic.
Websites track you through cookies and etags, and VPNs do not block those. If they did, you wouldn’t be able to log into any websites, and you would always be redownloading JS, CSS, and fonts you’ve already downloaded.
(Copied for convenience, since your comment is duplicated.)