this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
197 points (97.6% liked)
Privacy
31935 readers
692 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not completley, there is 3rd party audit companies that can verify claims made by the VPN providers, like confirming no-log policy and such.
How do you trust the third parties? And even if the third parties think it is ok that doesn't mean that they aren't hiding something.
VPNs weren't designed to be private.
The p stands for private. They were designed to connect someone to a remote intranet...privately.
Yes, VPNs were quite literally designed to be private
How do you trust anyone? At some point you either do or don't, because it's just not possible to verify everything in your life.
The alternative would be not using an VPN and for me personally I trust my VPN provider a lot more than my luck of not getting chaught by chance.
Another option, if you have technical skills, is to just run your own VPN which tends to be pretty easy to setup on a VPS nowadays. You can find a VPS provider in a jurisdiction you want, and you control what gets logged.
....so, trust the hosting provider to not log...and that you won't screw up any config or update, and make sure to use anonymous payments, and...and...etc.
The only thing that actually matters is the jurisdiction. If your hosting provider is in a place that the country you live in can't legally force to hand the data over then you're much better off than using a service that may be sharing data with your government.
The topic in question here is not about government abuse of data, it's corporate abuses, but okay, let's set that aside.
You've said that it's safer to roll your own VPN using a VPS service precisely because you can't trust any VPN providers, or auditing organizations.
But you're now saying that you can trust a hosting provider based solely on which jurisdiction they reside in.
You're just arbitrarily picking which companies to trust with your connection traffic, but with added complexity, and significantly reduced egress locations for your traffic, which itself dramatically impacts any privacy benefits you were looking to achieve.
First of all, nowhere did I say anything about trusting any hosting provider. The point once again was about jurisdiction of the provider. Meanwhile, there's nothing more arbitrary about picking a hosting provider than a VPN.