School me on VPNs.

[Kevin B.]

I don't know exactly what privacy I've lost with this crap that I hadn't lost already, but it's the last straw for me. I'm operating under the assumption that free services won't be worth what I pay for 'em, so I'm willing to invest a couple bucks a month. Which services are worth looking into? What do I need to know to ask intelligent questions?

 

[balfred]

I'm only familiar with the virtual private network form of VPN. Is that what you are talking about?

 

[Kevin B.]

Yes, sorry.

 

[balfred]

So a VPN connects your pc to another network at which point your traffic is routed through that network and hides all traffic while on the VPN from your Internet provider. The downside is finding one that is trustworthy and ultimately the VPN provider will know everything you do. VPNs can be awesome but they are also known to be a sketchy and malicious. The VPN provider could packet sniff all of your traffic and find all sorts of information about you, steal your identity, sell your information, etc.

 

[shortstraw8]

IMO, if you are just trying to hide traffic from ISP they are not worth it unless you set your own up.

Modem
Router
DMZ
Firewall
Then get a server somewhere(external) and install openvpn, that way you control everything.
But can be time consuming and expensive to build.

but a subscription to OpenVPN or PIA VPN would be fine too and inexpensive.
The only real issue is I am not sure of any VPN supplied by a company that does not log and track everything you do.
You could look into using onion browser, but that usually not a good idea either.

 

[gijohn40]

and Netflix is starting to not work with most VPN's

 

[Spork]

If you're worried about being tracked it's a little too late. Check out the lightbeam if you're using firefox. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/lightbeam/ this will show you what other web sites are accessed when you hit a page.

As an example when I refreshed the page RME sent info to viglink.com and google-analytics.com , both are used most likely for advertising. When I hit another page like KSL.com it shows I connect to 7 other 3rd party sites, and shows me that google-analytics.com is also one of them. So in theory, I they could be sharing some kind of data between them. If you want something frightening hit Dell.com and build out a server, they contacted 32 sites. This probably is why when you do a google search for something like shoes you will be visiting some other page and there will be an advertisement for the same shoes you were looking at 2 days ago. All this is happening outside of the law that is waiting on Trump's desk. From what I understand the bill just allows your ISP to watch you and attempt to make money off your habits if they weren't already. This all falls into the "Big Data" bucket where businesses are attempting to look into their crystal ball and determine what you're going to do next. If they think Kevin is going to be buying a ring and pinion from one of his recent posts maybe they have yukon gear as an advertiser and you'll start seeing advertisements and you're not quite sure why you're seeing them. A VPN won't do anything to prevent this, clearing cache, removing cookies, or using the incognito mode are ways around being tracked to a point. The VPN just prevents your ISP from getting the data not google-analytics or one of the other big advertising overlords, what keeps the VPN you selected from selling your information? I use a smaller ISP so I'm not sure their capability of selling my data, it costs money to do the big data thing, I'm not sure smaller ISPs would be analyzing it themselves, I'd be more concerned about an entity like Google or the government contacting my ISP and saying hey we want to stick an appliance that watched traffic and sent it off.

Sorry went off on a tangent, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean someone's not out to get you...

 

[nnnnnate]

Lots of people use a VPN to torrent music and shows. There are VPNs out there that claim to never track anything from any of their users, you have to trust them though like others here have said.

Shortstraw8 mentioned using Onion browser which is also know as Tor and that that might be a bad idea as well. I agree more or less. Tor is a portal to the "dark web" and is where the "Silk Road" was located before the FBI broke it up and made lots of arrests. Tor functions by annnonymizing the hops your internet traffic makes from node to node (you to where ever you are trying to get) through a combination of encryption and randomization. Basically your internet traffic is like a snake that is chopped up into sections. Each section had different parts of important information but they also all list the destination and home location. Tor changes this data so the snake only lists the next node at a time as the destination. The thought was that by doing this a malicious party would have to control all the nodes to get your data information and learn who sent the data and what they were hoping to get to. This was great in theory but it was cracked and the gov was able to take control or spoof enough things to crack it. (This is an overly simplified explanation but you get the idea.)

What no one has commented is that using a VPN or Tor will slow down your interneting ability. You are adding more steps to get to those cute cat videos on youtube and that inevitably just takes longer to do. I have played around with Tor in the past but found it to be very slow. Like, really, really, slow. I don't like to internet slow. I've never done the VPN thing, the closest I've come is to use a location spoofer but that was really only to bypass some location restrictions on soccer streaming and these "exploits" were unfortunately patched over the winter and no longer work. While I don't personally use these services I think its great that we're talking about them.

 

[Kevin B.]

So after doing some more reading last night, I have installed Opera, enabled it's native ad block and VPN, and added the HTTPS Anywhere and Ghostery extensions. Ghostery for Firefox would tell me when it had detected and blocked a tracker, I'm hoping it'll do the same in Opera. If anyone's interested I'll report back after I've used this setup for a bit.

 

[Unimog]

It's a partial fix, but I have installed host files on my most-often used computers that forward most known advertising and data-gathering hosts to localhost, effectively shutting them off. I know this doesn't patch all the holes in the dike, it is just a swat at practices that I don't like.