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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I hate how the privacy services shove in your face the "unprotected" word (lemmy.today)

submitted 3 hours ago by JohnDarlen@lemmy.today to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

You disable the VPN, they show "unprotected", come on, I'm not really unprotected, why such a dramatic word, I just disabled the thing a little, I'm "disconnected" but it doesn't mean I'm actually unprotected, the same way it doesn't mean I'm actually protected if I'm using a VPN.

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[–] MasterBlaster@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

It all depends on what you're supposed to be protected from. Vpns protect your Communications from being intercepted and keeps your location anonymous.

So you are in fact unprotected from being located identified and tracked. You are also unprotected from having your Communications intercepted by a man in the middle.

If you're on a public unsecured Wi-Fi network you are totally exposed. If you are on your own router connected through an isp, the ISP knows everything you're doing, and attaches your billing information to that data and uses it.

So I really don't think unprotected is a scare word. It is an accurate description of your situation.

[–] floofloof@lemmy.ca 10 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

VPNs don't prevent a device from announcing its real location. And they protect you from a MITM at the ISP but not at the VPN provider, so you just switch who you trust. VPNs also don't do anything to help with the browser fingerprinting that companies use to track you around the web. From the point of view of the services and sites you connect to, all a VPN does is change your IP address, and the IP address may not be a big part of how they track you in the first place. VPNs alone do not improve privacy much at all.

What VPNs do is shield your traffic metadata from inspection by the network hops between your client and the VPN provider (though the content is almost always enxrypted even without the VPN), and change your apparent location for any service that is exclusively using IP-based geolocation.