Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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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If you have HTTPs everywhere on, how much harm can a malicious wifi network do? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I kinda don't trust my home network because my brother is douche and I feel like he's gonna do some weird things with the connection, so I prefer to juse use my phone's data (unlimited data plan) to avoid any shenanigans. Hypothetically, how much harm can an evil wifi do?

Does using HTTPS avoid all risks? What about evey program on your computer or every app on your phone, do they also have HTTPS everywhere on? (I use Android btw)

How much could a VPN do better that HTTPS cant?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago

I think there's some fundamental misunderstandings about what each technology does.

HTTPS encrypts the data you send to each website. However, there's no guarantee a website will respect that setting (though they often do) and it may or may not include ancillary data and trackers from third party JavaScript; if there's an issue, your browser may fallback to HTTP mode. DNS requests will almost always be unencrypted, so each gateway between you and the website can at least see where your IP address went.
VPNs essentially act as a proxy for your internet browsing. What that means is that anyone who could sniff your traffic can see that you established an encrypted tunnel to the VPN IP, but they would have to be able to track that second IP address to see where you were going. Each gateway operator between you and the VPN can only see that you connected to the VPN, and the VPN will forward all traffic requests you made back to you via an encrypted tunnel. Good VPNs will also send your DNS requests to their servers, so all anyone can see is that your connection is wholly tied to the VPN.

In your case, your brother could mess with the DNS on the router to send you wherever he wants when you type in google.com, he could set up a hosts file to block you from going to specific sites or IP addresses, or he could manipulate any unencrypted data packets you receive.

Using your phone internet just puts your privacy in the hands of your phone's network operator instead. How much do you trust them not to rat you out?

If you want anonymity or ways to get around blocks, you need to use a logless VPN at minimum or something like Tor, depending on your needs.