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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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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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[–] 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.