I understand why people would want to use a VPN to change their location and access region-specific content. I also understand that it is a good way of hiding your activity from your internet provider, but aren’t you just re-routing your connection via the VPN provider’s network?
Is this inherently better for data privacy? Or are you just choosing to trust somebody else (the VPN provider vs your internet provider) with your data?
In: Technology
While everything people have said is usually true, there is one situation where using a VPN can be genuinely better than not and that’s security flaws.
Attackers can use what’s called a wifi-pineapple to exploit security flaws. This is a device that connects to wifi (such as at coffee shop), and makes everyone connect through-it. The attacker can then monitor all the traffic going through. Generally they won’t be able to do much. They can see what your ISP sees, but if you’re using HTTPS, not much else. But then there are security flaws. There was one recently with AI chatbots where researchers were able to recover a lot of the chat even when encrypted. Another one that was just announced (Blast-RADIUS) was in RADIUS which is a very old authentication method still used for lots of systems today. It hasn’t been used yet, but it’s also likely to not be fixed anytime soon.
Both of these security flaws (ant a ton of previous ones) could be mitigated by using a VPN. Yes someone who broke into the VPN system could still exploit them, but a hacker with a wifi-pineapple couldn’t.
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