Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Disable VPN while browsing casual or leave running? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Hey guys n gurls, I was wondering if it is smart to disable my VPN connection for casual browsing.

Reasons: when having VPN constantly running it may be possible to track me via browser fingerprinting.

Szenario: the connection coming from the VPN which hypothetically downloaded a torrent, tries to watch capitalist propaganda while living in China, etc.pp has this screen ratio, this locale, this addons etc. And (more important) the YouTube login cookie we know belongs to this physical person/telephone number etc.

So I am wondering if I should only use the VPN when "needing" it (read articles not available in country, Netflix, read information government doesn't like, things like that.) Or if I'm missing something here and I could obscure my causal day to day browsing as well without decreasing the security of the VPN.

For reference, the VPN doesn't log anything (for more than a day) to my knowledge

EDIT: From what I understand from the comments: switching the VPN has little to no impact on widely used tracking and if at all makes it easier to corelate data. People emphasize the general lack of full privacy if you are wanted by entities willing to spend enough resources. But for the general need of privacy in normal usecases it makes more sense to just leave the VPN running.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Timing attacks are a thing and behavior can be correlated by metadata and situational considerations, e.g. Bob only uses his VPN at night, and only for 21 minutes on average. Jane uses her VPN from roughly 830am to 515pm M-F. What do those patterns mean?

But so long as it works and the costs are low, use the VPN constantly. And always check for leaks.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Any suggestions about checking leaks etc? I have done this one check, but I'm not that deep in the matter to know if its enough.

So you say to keep it running - any (technical) reasoning or just that you think my YouTube connection exiting the vpn and the connection to the website the government doesn't like exiting the VPN can not be correlated that easy?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

If you use it for everything, when you use it ceases to be useful information for data gatherers.

It’s why companies have data retention policies. That way they can’t be accused of intentionally destroying data to hide things, because they destroy ALL data like that.