Who Owns, Operates, and Develops Your VPN Matters

Do people here trust their ISPs more than their VPN providers? That’s the question!

On the other hand, as far as privacy from the end point is concerned, users can be identified regardless of IP addresses. Visit fingerprint.com, you will get an identifier, then connect to a privacy VPN and change servers once in a while. The website will identify you, tell you are the same user visited last week from such location, and the number of times you visited.

Browsers (except Tor) send so much data that accurate identification is possible without IP address. And services could refuse to work if users don’t provide the required information, although that info could be randomized.

I'm more worried about all the sites that require my phone number under the auspices of two-factor authentication. It's probably the most trackable bit of personally-identifying information these days.

I do trust my ISP more than any foreign VPN service providers because I have the option to take my ISP to court if they violate my rights. I stopped caring about anonymity on political subjects when I realised not being anonymous made me more civil online, and more mindful of what I want to talk about. (Ofcourse, I can think like this because I have the privilege of living a democracy).

If you lived in a place like Germany or the UK, you could get arrested for posting online that you don't like what Israel is doing in Gaza or that you think Elon Musk is a Nazi (among other things you could get arrested for saying). In this case, routing your traffic through an unknown intermediary makes sense.

You said you have to be mindful of what you say and how you say it, in order to comply with the law. In other words, your legitimate speech is being chilled. Why do you think that's okay?

Damn, I thought incognito at least did some obfuscation.

https://coveryourtracks.eff.org

I had no idea about "Canvas fingerprinting" or that my browser tells sites how many CPUs I have installed.

I do say many critical things about my political leaders and government policies, online. But, like I said, I am more mindful of what I say and how I say it (e.g. I often quote such things from a news source / media). (People in Germany and UK can do so too - just understand the law and quote DW, BBC, DailyMail etc., all of whom have mentioned something about the Gaza genocide or Elon Musk's Nazi like behaviour, at some point). If the government wants to come after you, they will. You have to have faith in your democracy and the courts. If you are losing faith in your democratic setup, be prepared to mobilise people with some political party (or start one) and fight for your rights - it will have more lasting political impact than any anonymous post you make online.

I absolutely trust VPNs like Mullvad and iVPN more than my ISP. It's a major reason I use a VPN.

Thank you!

I use a VPN because it does NAT and shared public IP. My residential connection’s public IP and timestamp uniquely identifies my physical residence.

Also ISPs are shady and will sniff your DNS and SNI and they know your name, address, and phone number, and will sell it all as a bundle.

>more mindful of what I want to talk about

I would call that self censorship. If I want to insult a politician I will do so from a network location that won't get me put in legal trouble.

>I can think like this because I have the privilege of living a democracy

This has less to do with the political system than free speech which is nonexistent or limited even in most western countries that are democracies

I’d probably use a VPN if I need to do something sketchy or egregiously illegal, but self hosted and behind 7 proxies. Or I could just use TOR and exercise a bit of OPSEC.

I have faith the courts will interpret the law as written, because that's what they almost always have done so far, and the way they've previously interpreted it. And the law as written says don't be antisemitic. And the law as previously interpreted is that saying anything bad about Israel is antisemitism.

Quoting antisemitic publications for the purpose of agreeing with them is also antisemitism, not sure why you'd think it wouldn't be.

Yeah, I understand your point quite well. Many western countries do (or are trying to) conflate criticism of Israel and antisemitism, to create a chilling effect to protests against their own foreign policies on Israel and Israel's policies on Palestine ( see https://politics.stackexchange.com/q/93431 ). But, like I said, while a government intent on persecuting will do so, they still have to deal with the courts too - as far as I know, no one has been successfully prosecuted under such laws.

> Quoting antisemitic publications for the purpose of agreeing with them is also antisemitism, not sure why you'd think it wouldn't be.

Not really. It would be the media outlet who would be liable as you are only simply repeating what they said in good faith.