Should I use VPN for sites that have my personal info?
So why you could not use VPN on websites that contain your personal information? What is the reason?
You should definately use your VPN when banking and any other critical info.
I.e on airports, or other public places.
As mentioned before, the whole point is you cannot be identified by external ip as there are thousands of users using the same services.
Secondly, VPN basically secures your data receive/transmission so even your provider cannot read any information you are transferring. They can however see a tunnel has been established.
In fact, in my opinion every ISP should be offering a VPN solution, but they probably make a lot of money on selling data.
Be safe, wrap your…data.
Source: am networkengineerman
Your IP address will be the one of you VPN provider so the service won’t be able to match your home IP address with your personal data. I would be more worried about all the non encrypted datas the VPN provider can sniff. Check your services are using HTTPS
Uh, what specifically?
As others have said, the VPN IP that the site will see is shared with other users and tracking you will not be that easy.
In addition what you can do is to choose one of your VPN provider’s servers and use it only for the things you were saying, like banking. Then switch to other servers for normal browsing.
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Why do you use vpn in the first place?
Because they’ll now IP of the my vpn server and my real name, adress, phone number etc. I am afraid it will be associated to other sites I visited from this vpn IP without my personal information
Specifically for banking sites, exchange sites that has my real name, phone number, birth date, etc. I’m afraid usign vpn for this will betray my privacy on sites than have no my personal info. I am considering using a separate browser and shelter profile on android for such websites without vpn connection.
>If you’re doing anything illegal, VPNs will not protect you - period.
It will protect you when you’re using p2p to download/seed your Linux images. But yeah anything worse than that and you’ll probably be caught eventually no matter what you do. Either because you screwed up or because you’re being actively targeted, so just don’t do illegal stuff.
So, I can’t quite tell what the full issue is, however, most VPNs have multiple options of where you “come out,” which means that, even if your exit is compromised by your bank for some reason communicating with your ISP, or whatever the problem is, so long as you change servers from time to time, there’s no issue. On a VPN, multiple people use the same exit, meaning that as soon as you move to a different one, nobody can tell who went where, and everyone because one jumbled mess.
But if isp has my real name and my bank has my real name, they can easily link my external IP and my isp IP for tracking?
If there’s anything to learn about the Snowden leaks, and the AT&T room 641a before that, it’s that if it’s not in your immediate control, it’s compromised. Everything leading out from your house is just a big network and subject to snooping. Two points where Tor/VPNs save you here is:
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Everything from you to whatever endpoint is practically undecipherable by today’s known technology if implemented correctly, so as your data heads to the endpoint, all that is known is that it originates from you and heads to your endpoint, assuming you’re not accidentally leaking anything. Care is needed with DNS and WebRTC
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Your data is included in the general pool coming out of the endpoint, be it the Tor endpoint* or the VPN endpoint. The way your identity is protected here is that all these requests are just coming in and out of the endpoint, so anyone snooping this data can’t identify which traffic correctly corresponds to which user, thus your searches for duct tape can’t be correlated to your searching for rope, for example.** There’s a question here which is: what if the VPN itself is compromised? The best answer to that is picking one in a non-Five-Eyes country. I’ve heard great things about Mullvad (They even take cash!) and I had an online scammer friend who swore by EarthVPN. Couldn’t tell you why he used it in particular. Edit: forgot to mention, if you use something like HTTPS, it’s pretty much solid. In transit from you to the VPN, your data is protected by both SSL, and the SSL/TLS that’s part of HTTPS. Between the VPN and the end service, it’s secured by HTTPS. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but provided you have pre-existing certificates and this isn’t your first ever connection with a site, even the VPN would be unable to read the actual data within. The reason I disclaim that by saying that it’s the first connection is that you’re vulnerable, theoretically, to a man in the middle attack where the VPN presents you with it’s own HTTPS, and then initiates it’s own session with the end service. This is more a worry with Tor I suppose, since anyone can create an exit node including people with malicious intent. Theoretically this is combated through certificate signing so I guess this goes to show always make sure your certificate is signed. It’s the default these days, and using self-signed certs almost always throws a warning in your browser. I just want to be as thorough as possible. So yeah, absolutely use any security options available to you.
So yeah, what’s mostly in your control here is making sure all identifying traffic goes through this tunnel, and using any security technology where optionally available like DNSSEC
*Note: I won’t lie, I don’t really understand the deal with compromising Tor, I’ve heard that an entity controlling enough individual exit nodes can compromise the network through analysis but I know nothing about it other than that.
**This can be defeated through browser/device fingerprinting so if you’re dead serious about privacy you should disable JavaScript where not necessary.