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You probably don't need a VPN
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this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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Another reason to use a VPN is that ISPs have every motive to sell your browsing data and they do. Unlike many other groups tracking you, your ISP inherently has your meatspace name, address, and payment information making their data easily collatable and very valuable.
If you use the default DNS on their provided router they can even tell if someone purchased an XBox, Playstation, or any other smart device just from update and telemetry lookups.
As the article says, by using a VPN youre using someone else's ISP making that info worthless.
If your threat model includes preventing ad networks from gathering data, a VPN absolutely is a tool to prevent that. Do you have to pay for a service? Probably not if you're technical enough; a VM in a data center is probably sufficient.
Yep. BIG deficiency in this article. I don't use a VPN because of shadowy "hackers" who sit in front of their keyboards with a pistol and a balaclava. I use it because ISPs and governments have demonstrated they can't be trusted.
How about this?
Uh, what? If someone wants my traffic logs in the US, now they have to go through Mullvad, which has a track record of not providing or collecting it.
They don't even know who I am, much less have all the data that my ISP has about me. So selling it would be pretty useless
Oh last edit: turns out this is the guy who was trying to well ackshually us into thinking Chrome nerfing ad blockers is not a big deal.
Yeah, part of it reads like he was paid to do it, just without including obvious marketing links so he can claim in the article that he wasn’t. Ending the article with valid use cases seems like preventing anyone saying he left out valid reasons, but after a wall of text that could make less savvy users do a “TL;DR: VPN not needed” before they got to that part. I’d respect it more if he led off with the same short description of valid uses, especially considering the article title, then pivoted to where it could be irrelevant.