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
No, not really.
VPN services generally are sold as being something that they are not.
All you really doing is masquerading the origin point of your requests on the internet. This is good if you are trying to get around geo-blocking on things like streaming sites, or need to hide illicit activity on the internet like Piracy. The problem is VPN services can’t really advertise themselves this way so they make this smoke and mirrors pitch about protecting your privacy.
There’s an argument to be made if you are out and about at say a coffee shop a VPN can prevent hackers in the vicinity from snooping on your activity, yet the majority of what you do online is encrypted these days anyway so it’s kind-of irrelevant. A hacker could potentially see what websites you are going to, but they couldn’t see what you are doing there.
>I understand why people would want to use a VPN to change their location and access region-specific content.
That’s the primary reason to use a VPN
>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?
Correct
>Is this inherently better for data privacy?
No not really
>Or are you just choosing to trust somebody else (the VPN provider vs your internet provider) with your data?
yup, exactly
And can you really trust the VPN provider?
The VPN nodes are located in random datacenter around the world. Most of the nodes are known, there are lists of known VPN nodes being updated all the time.
So what’s to stop a government entity from going into one of those datacenters and inspecting all traffic going in and out of one of those VPN nodes? Who’s to say they aren’t already doing that?
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