this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Privacy

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Are VPN good for privacy today, should we used them to protect our privacy?

Not free, none have all advantages and wouldn't let my ISP only know my traffic so these times I'm really overwhelmed by all of this

Used Tor for a bit but it's not practically useful, slow (okay but not the main problem) and blocked by a lot of websites..

Maybe a chain of VPN could be good? I really don't know, can you help me?

Basically I don't want to have no protection but don't think VPNs are really the solution...

PS: maybe a rented machine with self hosted like VPN could be good?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

Privacy is a trade-off against convenience, and there is no perfect privacy.

VPNs are a mediocre privacy tool, because they presuppose trust in the VPN provider. Tor is flawed because it is open to correlation attacks.

There are low-hanging fruit that everybody should be using like sensible cookie policies, HTTPS-only mode, and DNS over HTTPS.

If you are looking for a solution on the far end of privacy/inconvenience you could look into I2P and use that situationally.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

I would rather put my trust in a good VPN provider than the big CAs. And HTTPS only and DoH is not going to protect you from fingerprinting using your IP address.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Is a self hosted VPN good for daily privacy?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

That depends on your threat model. It's a useful strategy to hide your traffic from your local network admin (e.g. at the workplace) and your ISP, but it's a bad strategy for hiding your identity from the sites you're visiting.