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Excuse me for my lack of understanding, but why are there so many people looking to hide their traffic from their ISP with a VPN? Isn't HTTPS enough? Are you afraid of ISPs resorting to DPI or MiM to spy on their users? Is customer protection so weak in the US that ISPs are free to spy on their customers using aforementioned techniques?
Edit: I just realized that I left out people leaving under authoritarian regimes, for whom VPNs are unfortunately required to evade their government.
To me, the problem is you are instead giving over all of your info to the VPN company, and still be tracked by other means such as fingerprinting of devices, cookies/site data or browsing patterns. Is some random VPN company more trustworthy than my ISP and who’s to say they aren’t sharing the information? Plus, the could also be subpoenaed/NSLed if that’s the concern.
I'd be more willing to trust a VPN company with this data than an ISP. The former's entire business hinges on providing privacy to their customers while the latter can just sell your data to whoever they want and most people wouldn't bat an eye.
I'd have plenty of questions about the VPN company though. Some of these would be the same as ISPs, some worse for VPN companies.
- do we know if they're compromised by our government or a foreign government?
- Are their systems actually secure?
- do they explicitly share data with a government, like they may be forced to?
- do they sell data and just lie about it?
- do they actually log data and lie about not logging or deleting it?
- what if they do something like an exit scam where it turns out they did collect all your info, and then sell it before they close up shop?
Legitimate questions, but why would it be worse for VPN companies?
The way I see it, I have no way of verifying the answers to any of these regardless of whether it's an ISP or a VPN, but I do know that VPNs have a greater incentive to provide you with proper privacy because if they were found to fail at this, the entire business dies. ISPs run no such risk, especially since many of them are effectively monopolies.
Because HTTPS protects only things you do on the site. ISP still knows which sites you connect to. Which YouTube video you are watching to. etc. F.E. in Russia ISP's have to keep logs of users interactions for half of year and give it to government when they need them.
ISP still knows which sites you connect to.
Yes, because they know the IPs your packets go to, but if there are multiple websites behind a single IP they won't know which one (unless you use your ISP DNS server, which you should probably not)
Which YouTube video you are watching to. etc.
No, because the URL is contained within the HTTP packets which are encrypted with SSL (the S in HTTPS), so unless the ISP does MiM, they cannot know which URL you are visiting.
Hmm... You have way better knowledge than I am. It seems so. Should think about this things some time later 😉
Because my ISP stopped my internet access last time they were contacted by a copyright holder whose thing I torrented.