this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2024
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Privacy

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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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[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 9 points 5 months ago (7 children)

using a VPN ultimately consists in trusting the company providing the VPN service that it won't be fucking around with your privacy. Considering that all your traffic goes through it, that's a lot of trust to place in one company.

Is that any different than the trust we place in our ISPs?

I agree with you. I fully expect my ISP/VPN provider to sell my traffic data, but I don't see the value in paying a VPN do to it.

[–] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (6 children)

Is that any different than the trust we place in our ISPs?

It's not. Your ISP is probably selling your data, and your VPN may or may not do that too. Just assume everybody sells your data.

The difference is, when you leave home and you connect to a wifi, you start using another ISP. If you then lose the wifi and connect using 4G, you're using yet another ISP. If you use a VPN, you funnel all your traffic to a single provider all the time. In other words, instead of distributing the risk over several potentially bad actors, you concentrate it on a single one.

Like I said, that's a lot more trust that I'm willing to place in a single company that only essentially pinky-swears won't put me under surveillance.

[–] 1984 10 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (5 children)

I trust my vpn provider, but I don't trust my isp to not give out my ip. So using a VPN is obvious and I havent had any issues doing that for decades.

If your mindset is that you can't trust anyone, then yes, doesn't matter. But you can trust some of them. You need to know which ones have a history of caring about privacy and which ones are just advertised heavily.

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