If so, can you explain the value aside from changing location for streaming?
While your ISP can’t see everything, they can see metadata. They can see which websites you go to, which social media you use the most, where you bank, where you shop, etc. How much do you think it would take for your ISP to sell that data? If you happen to live somewhere there are laws againat that, you are slightly less at risk. Fines are only a deterrant if they’re more than what’s being offered for your data.
That being said, this only protects you against your ISP or other purely ipaddress based info gatherers. Apps/social media/websites don’t purely use ipaddresses to track you.
Encrypt DNS
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure this just encrypts your dns requests. After DNS resolution, the traffic packet headers still have destination/source ip addresses and they can reverse dns lookup the ip addresses. Might make it require a few extra steps, but they’re the ones routing the traffic. Even your VPN traffic, they can’t decrypt what’s inside the packets, but they can see your traffic going to a known Mullvad vpn address in Norway or whatever.
Correct.
Took me a minute to find it again, but there was an excellent essay answering this question. From https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/ :
There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.
…
On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.
So using signal for benign chatting between friends is praxis? Nice
When Nazis take power, everyone has something to hide
But yes, protection from compromised LANs or public wi-fi
Who do you trust more, the neighbor who closes their blinds or the neighbor running around house to house trying to look in everyone’s windows?
I use mine to maintain control of my home server while out of the house
Interesting
Just my use cases:
- Piracy
- I don’t need my ISP knowing everything I do regardless of legality.
- I don’t need dickhead network admins knowing everything I do on their network, regardless of legality.
- I don’t need every website knowing my identity regardless of legality.
- newpipe always takin’ 'bout some goddamn “sign in to confirm u no bot” and hell no I’m just gonna reroll my location and oh look that worked.
It’s completely legal for me to watch 70s pornography while drinking hard liquor and painting pentagrams on my walls and sacrificing small animals to Baal.
I’m not going to videotape it and show my grandmother.
watch 70s pornography
Ahh… Orthodox Muslim countries exist
drinking hard liquor
Ahh… Regular Muslim countries exist.
sacrificing small animals to Baal
Ahh… What is your definition of small?
videotape it and show
Hyperbolic for the average person.
You use VPN because you don’t want your ISP selling data about you to a data broker, and you don’t want your government to get that data for free.
Data about you, even if not about illegal activities, can be used to manipulate you.
Yes, even if you trust people in positions of power with access to that data which there are tons of evidence to not do that, laws change and the people enforcing the laws change. Not using a VPN is telling your ISP and potentially thousands of advertisers and dozens of governments everything you search for, private messages if you’re not using a peer to peer encrypted messaging app, and all of the meta data indicating where you are & when you sleep or are alone. Intelligence agencies run programs like those leaked (not just the US but definitely including them) and when there was little to no political backlash when those were revealed you can assume they are doing much worse now.
“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.” - Snowden
Either everyone’s data is public and transparent or nobody’s is, partial selection is just asking to be used as a weapon against the people being snooped on.
There’s value in real privacy friendly VPNs (think Mullvad), otherwise you just end up trusting some other, probably very shady actors with all your data instead.
Unless you need one for specific things like using free wifi safely, torrenting or getting around restrictions then there is not much benefit.
Most VPNs won’t even work for daily browsing as far as I’m aware. You’ll get hit with way more captchas and potentially just not be able to access certain sites because someone has either got the vpn providers ip banned temporarily on the site or the site bans IP addresses associated with servers.
Personally, for generic browsing, I’m not too concerned if my ISP can see the domain names I’m accessing. I, as you probably do, only use HTTPS everywhere so the domain name is the most they’ll know, but you can do some work to try limiting exposure with DNS over HTTPS (DoH), etc if you want to.
There’s also TLS 1.3 addition of ECH which further helps by hiding the hostname.
Of course your ISP will always know the IP address you send packets to, but that is an even smaller problem.
And my final note: just use one when you need to, I don’t think it’s necessary to have one on 24/7 at home like some people advise and NEVER use a free vpn or one of the more mainstream ones (mullvad is best, second choice is AirVPN).
Of course. Th legal things you do today can be made illegal tomorrow.
Everything you do in the internet is being shared with data brokers who then sell your info and you dont get a cut!
Some things should be private. Some things should be secret. Not because there’s anything wrong with them, but simply because they’re yours and you want to keep them that way.
Encrypt your DNS as well, then ISP can’t even see what you’re searching for
This is fine advice but doesn’t answer OP’s question, only adds to it.
“Give me the man and I will give you the case against him.”
It’s not about whether or not you’re doing anything wrong, it’s about how the powers that be can decide at any point that what you’re doing is wrong when it’s convenient to them.
I use vpns primarily for circumventing geofencing
