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Will VPNs Protect Your Privacy? It's Complicated

Posted by msmash on from the how-about-that dept.

From a CNET report: A VPN redirects your internet traffic, disguising where your computer, phone or other device is when it makes contact with websites. It also encrypts information you send across the internet, making it unreadable to anyone who intercepts your traffic. That includes your internet service provider. Ha! Problem solved -- right? Well, sort of. The big catch is, now the VPN has your internet traffic and browsing history, instead of your ISP. What's to stop the VPN from selling your information to the highest bidder? Of course, there are reputable VPN services out there, but it's incumbent on you the user to "do your homework," Ajay Arora, CEO of cybersecurity company Vera said. In addition to making sure the VPN will actually keep your data private, you'll want to make sure there's nothing shady in the terms and conditions. Shady how? Well, in 2015, a group of security-minded coders discovered that free VPN service Hola was selling its users' bandwidth to the paying customers of its Luminati service. That meant some random person could have been using your internet connection to do something illegal. So, shady like that. "I would recommend you do some cursory level research in terms of reputation [and] how long they've been around," Arora said, "And when you sign up, read the fine print." From a report on Wired: Christian Haschek, an Austria-based security researcher, wrote a script that analyzed 443 open proxies, which route web traffic through an alternate, often pseudo-anonymous, computer network. The script tested the proxies to see if they modified site content or allowed users to browse sites while using encryption. According to Haschek's research, just 21 percent of the tested proxies weren't "shady." Haschek found that the other 79 percent of surveyed proxy services forbid secure, HTTPS traffic.

7 of 141 comments (clear)

  1. Because you can choose your VPN... by ctilsie242 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    With ISPs, you can't really choose who gives you the pipe to your home or school. You may have a telco, and a cable company, if that.

    With VPNs, if one is found to be selling data, you can switch in a heartbeat.

    Then, there are the privacy policies. A VPN having a privacy policy of not handing your traffic over will get in a lot more trouble if they sell that data than an ISP that has a privacy policy of "if it goes through our fiber, we can do what we please with it."

    VPNs are not perfect... but they do help significantly. It is sad that things have come down to this, as it makes police work a lot harder once the bad guys "go dark", but people are tired of having their data sold, or advertising IDs added to non-encrypted traffic.

  2. Re:Why Not by MightyYar · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Can one pay for a cloud service anonymously?

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  3. Proxies vs. VPN by 110010001000 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What does a VPN have to do with web proxies? I'm so confused by this website.

  4. Competition by Fire_Wraith · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sure, a VPN proxy could monitor my traffic as much as my ISP can. Using https they might see where I'm going, but not the contents. The thing is, I can easily switch VPNs if I don't like the service, whereas in the US, I don't have that choice so much with my ISP, short of physically moving to another location. If I'm lucky, I might live in an area with two viable choices. In my current case, I can choose between Verizon and Comcast, which is like being asked to choose between gonorrhea and syphilis.*

    And now thanks to the f*ckwit Republicans in control of Congress, my ISP can now sell everything it knows about me to anyone they like, without any recourse on my part, short of using some sort of proxy. At least with VPN proxies, there's no real barrier to entry, save for bandwidth capacity, and I can choose from any number of options, that I'm going to now have to start looking at.

    *Apologies to gonorrhea and syphilis for comparing them to the likes of Verizon and Comcast.

  5. shady by fluffernutter · · Score: 1, Insightful

    So he analyzed free proxies and some were shady? Is it a revelation that there are shady things on the internet?

    --
    Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
  6. Seems like it's somewhat worse than that... by lazlo · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If you don't use a VPN, your data is vulnerable to your ISP. If you do use a VPN, your data is vulnerable to your VPN provider *and* to *their* ISP.

    Maybe they've got a better (in terms of privacy) ISP than you do. But be aware that that is also a concern.

    --
    Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
    1. Re:Seems like it's somewhat worse than that... by Asgard · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If you don't use a VPN, *your* ISP can correlate all your traffic to your billing information (which is necessarily very detailed as they often have a physical cable to your location). If use a VPN, *their* ISP can only correlate that traffic to the VPN's billing info and not your own. Of course, the VPN provider can make this correlation but there are more options for VPN providers than ISPs in a given location.