this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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I live in a country where our ISPs are required by law to keep a record of our internet metadata. When ISPs have been subpoenaed in the past ths answer has often been "we don't keep that data".
So in that case we're looking at a likelihood of 1 vs less than 1. So you're wrong there.
Plus, I would love to hear your source on these probabilities you proclaim. Can you share how you know this?
You said "far more likely", so one assumes you have the numbers.
There are definitely some VPN providers to worry about.
VPNs are a security tool but they don't protect people as much as they think. They hide DNS traffic your ISP would have received, so that your ISP can't tell everyone which cuckold or affair site you access (except you probably forgot to turn the VPN on one time or another so...)
Your ISP can still see IP addresses you connect to, they forward all your traffic. Good opsec is a nightmare. Ad blocking does more for less cost than getting a VPN will ever do (except for certain human rights circumstances but I'd wager they're actually going to be careful).
My personal tip is use DNS over HTTPS/TLS where possible, and don't use Cloudflare or Google. Ad an ad blocker and it's far easier to setup and way more cost effective than VPN.
Using a VPN will prevent your ISP from selling your IP logs to data brokers. It also obfuscates your IP to websites you visit to make their fingerprinting less precise. All your ISP can see is that you're connecting to/from a VPN server through an encrypted tunnel and maybe some metadata like amount of data transferred.
Hard to compare value to free stuff like encrypted DNS and an ad blocker but a VPN definitely has protections you wouldn't get otherwise.