Basically what the title says. I don’t get how VPNs can keep me safe when I’m **hypothetically** torrenting. Can’t ISPs or the company owning the copyright track me down if I were to?
In: 30
internet traffic is basically like sending a box from walmart through the mail. A vpn is the plain brown box things are usually shipped in except they send it to other places in other boxes first so by the time it gets to you it’s from someplace else entirely.
Your ISP only sees the IP that is connecting to the hypothetical (by the way torrenting itself isn’t illegal, it depends on the content) torrent. So they see the VPNs IP address and not your’s. Essentially what is happening is they’re sending it to your VPNs server who is then forwarding it to you. Since almost all good VPNs keep no logs, it’s (mostly) untraceable and not worth their time to pursue it anyway.
Because 1) the traffic is encrypted so your ISP/government can’t see that you are downloading copyrighted material unless they compromise the VPN server and 2) all your traffic goes through the VPN server so the ISP/government can’t see that you are connecting to a website that facilitates said downloads, again, unless they compromise the VPN server.
Your ISP can see that you’re sending encrypted data back and forth from your VPN and that’s it.
Your VPN can see what you’re doing (including torrents), but part of the service that many VPNs advertise is that they don’t keep logs. If they kept logs they’d have to hand it over to law enforcement upon request, and if customers started getting caught then word would spread and no one would want to use that VPN. So they are incentivized to keep their promise not to log, and if law enforcement complains to the VPN about customer activity, they can honestly say that they don’t have any logs to give them. There’s no law in the US that requires logs.
A better explanation/metaphor is using the mail. You can send letters to/from the mailbox, and in there if someone was watching your mailbox, they could see the mail you are sending or receiving.
But if you sign up for a P.O. Box, you use that address for sending and receiving. Carrying your mail to/from the P.O. Box is like the VPN. Dumping the mail in a postbox mixes the mail, so no one would know what mail was yours without breaking into the Post Office.
Vpn is sorta like connecting to your neighbors wifi and using it.
Except the VPN can be anywhere in the world
All anyone sees on your end is you are connecting to some server in (insert place here)
Torrenting is just downloading little chucks of a file from up to hundreds of different sources, it’s not illegal.
To understand a VPN, it’s easiest to start with a proxy.
A proxy is something that does an action on your behalf. Like, say you’re below the legal age to buy something in your country, like cigarettes or alcohol. If you tried, at best you’d be asked to leave, at worst you’d be arrested. If you’re crafty, you could find someone who *is* able to go and ask them to go get it for you. As far as anyone can tell at the store where the thing you want is, a random legal person is there to buy something for their own use, so all their checks pass. And anyone watching you will only see you hanging out with some guy. That guy would be your proxy.
Computers can basically do the same thing. Your computer phones up the proxy. Your ISP, who watches everyone you talk to (but not what you’re talking *about*) just sees you communicating with a random PC somewhere. Your proxy then goes to whatever website you’re looking for and grabs what you want. As far as that website is concerned, some random computer asked for the thing, not you. And the proxy gives you what you wanted. Ideally, you bypass all restrictions and no one is the wiser.
It’s not a foolproof system. If it’s well known that your friend likes to buy things and illegally give them to minors, your friend might get banned too. Or anyone watching both of you could easily put two and two together to see what’s really going on. To some extent this is the same for computers–there are lists of IP addresses out there that tell websites which computers are proxies… basically like the sex offenders list, but for computers. They can’t tell who these computers are working for, but they know they’re probably working for *someone*, presumably someone trying to skirt past rules or laws, so these proxies might get banned.
So, VPN. Technically, a VPN is something much more broad and general than simply hiding your Internet traffic. But in the context which you probably care about, a VPN is like an army of proxies for hire. When you connect to a VPN, you get hooked up to a random computer that the VPN company owns, and you use that computer as your proxy. They might even spread all your network requests across many, many proxies, so your messages never look like they’re coming from the same place. It’s be like… instead of sending one guy to go get you smokes, porn mags, and chew from the corner store, you instead send three different guys, one to get the smokes, one to get the magazines, and one to get the chew. The end result is it’s difficult to trace things back to you.
Think like this; let’s say im trying to follow you to see what you’re doing. I see you go into a mcdonalds. I don’t know what you did at the McDonald’s, what you ordered, how you ate it, if you even ordered something at all. Then I follow you to your next place which is a store: I don’t know what you bought at the store or how much it cost you and let’s say you’re hiding the bags out of sight so I don’t know if you bought something or how many things you bought.
The vpn is like you going into the McDonalds or the store and the normal internet is me following you around. Without the vpn its like me going into the store with you and seeing what you’re looking at/ what you bought and how much you spent.
They don’t keep you safe. They make is slightly more difficult to get to you and often copyright holders won’t bother and focus efforts on other lower hanging fruits — i.e. users that connect directly and can be identified by asking ISP for the customer that had the specific IP assigned at the specified time.
With VPN it takes a bit more steps to get to you and/or the process is longer and it simply is not worth the effort to find a dude who downloaded a song; but it’s naive to think that even “no logging” vpn will protect you. For instance, it does nothing against correlation analysys.
The only reasonable way to be safe/hard to trace is TOR but you need to be extremely careful not to leak any identifiable details.
Public commercial VPNs are only useful for overcoming geo restrictions and avoiding ISP throttling. Entrusting third party in different jurisdiction that “does not keep logs” to protect your privacy is oxymoron. But their aggressive marketing is pushing precisely this idea and it is working apparently.
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