Privacy

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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.

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Does VPNs even work against Big Brother apps? Using one really protects our privacy? (masking our location) (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am currently using Proton VPN (free tier) which is set to Always-ON and Block Connections on disable.

Today while I am going through my Gmail security option, on the devices/sessions I found my real location mentioned over there. Even when I use desktop I always connect to VPN.

On this issue I got couple of doubts:

Is this because I am using a free tier VPN? so it's not functioning properly etc...
Else google fixed my location based on my previous location history? I used my google applications without VPN for many years, I am just learning & following privacy tips recently.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Impossible to say without knowing everything about you and your situation but the most likely scenario is that at one point you were signed into a device with the VPN disabled or disconnected.

Google has ways of knowing your location but some of the more sinister ones, like determining your location based on WiFi, they're probably not going to broadcast back to you.