So I’m pretty recent to the high seas but I’ve seen a few posts now about “stop relying on your VPN” and “people that think VPNs will protect them are naive” and so on.
So since I believe knowledge is our greatest weapon/tool/super-power, can we get some answers regarding what exactly the doomsayers are getting at? ELI5 why VPNs wouldn’t protect your anonymity.
Is it about logging? The country your end-point is in? Something more technical?
Ultimately I’d like to be fully armed in order to keep making the best choices for my fledgling ship as it navigates the vast, stormy seas.
I think the big issue with commercial VPN’s are that you are trusting your traffic through someone else’s infrastructure where they’re typically a target for malicious actors.
If you want to be relatively sure of your privacy, use something like a cloud vm from for example digitalocean and install wireguard on it using https://pivpn.io
I have a home vpn where I connect to my home lan using the wireguard vpn app on my phone. Which means I get more privacy since mobile providers often slurp up dns queries to sell to advertisers and also it allows me to use my pihole for adblocking on my phone.
At the end of the day arguments for or against a particular solution are going to depend on what threats a person considers most important to protect against and where they’re willing to put their trust.
And if all you’re doing is downloading torrents, your need for protection is pretty low as all you’re trying to do is hide your IP address from some corporate lawyers.
So one of the lesser mentioned benefits of commercial VPN’s is that they have shared IPs. If you are renting a VPS from like DigitalOcean, it’s much easier to prove that the IP browsing a website belongs to you when that IP is dedicated to your VPS that is paid for by you.
For piracy/illegal activities, note that digitalocean account & ip is directly tied to you, unless you manage to create one completely anononymously