What’s stops a VPN service from doing the exact same thing that your ISP does (i.e tracking web activity and selling off for targeted advertising)?
Data still has to move to some type of router, it’s just instead of your own ISP’s it goes to a third party.
Just curious about opinions here so I can make more informed choices in the future.
Your ISP and VPN both could sell whatever data they have about you.
But there is a key difference: your ISP knows much more about you, usually. ISP knows your home physical location, almost certainly your name and phone number etc. But it’s pretty easy to sign up for a VPN while giving no ID, the only thing they care about is that your payment works. And most of them support paying via cash or gift card or Monero etc.
So usually it’s a win to split your data between ISP and VPN. ISP knows your home address and name etc and knows you’re using a VPN. VPN knows your home IP address and what destination IP addresses you talk to. Neither knows all the info.
Nothing. If I was a government wanting to track people, putting up a VPN company would be on my list of things to do.
Even with the VPN your data still goes via the ISP, they connect you to the VPN after all, it’s just that they can’t snoop. They could analyze the traffic pattern though and probably deduce if you are downloading something or streaming something.
Nothing.
This is why it’s important to pick a VPN with a no logs policy.
Nothing. It is why they are mostly pointless. They project to no real security.
Awesome thank you! That makes a lot more sense.
I’d go so far as to say they should have a no DISK policy as well, so that logs cannot even be persisted on the server by accident
You can’t do anything without a cache…
And whose gonna verify it?
you can’t, VPN providers rely on trust, they could say no logs while logging everything, we can’t know for sure
Thats what I implied, yes.
Even if we assume there would be some civilian organised inspection, they could just be bribed. And IT systems are so complex, if they wanted to hide it, they could