Privacy

51302 readers

399 users here now

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 :)

Related communities

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 6 years ago

MODERATORS

Obscura VPN 'We View Consumer Data as Toxic Waste' | itsfoss (itsfoss.com)

submitted 1 hour ago by new_otters_raft@piefed.ca to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

6 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm sharing this one because I'm curious what more knowledgeable people think about this one. Please take a peek at the article before joining the discussion, as my limited quote might have dropped useful information

The VPN industry runs on a promise. Pick almost any provider and the pitch is the same: "we don't keep logs." You hand over your entire internet connection and, in return, you get a pinky-promise that nobody is writing anything down.

For a lot of privacy-minded people, that promise stopped being good enough a while ago. A no-logs policy is only as honest as the company making it, and even an honest company can be hacked, subpoenaed, or quietly acquired.

Obscura VPN is trying to answer to that problem. Instead of asking you to trust its word, it splits the job across two independent companies so that neither one can tie your identity to your browsing. The first hop is Obscura's own servers; the exit hop is run by Mullvad. a respected VPM company out of Sweden. Your traffic is end-to-end encrypted to Mullvad's keys, so Obscura literally can't read it, and Mullvad never sees who you are.

top 6 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] the_abecedarian@piefed.social 7 points 23 minutes ago

also fuck Mullvad's cofounder for bankrolling the far right

[–] adarza@lemmy.ca 4 points 23 minutes ago

this isn't a revolutionary concept or anything, it's basically just tor, without the middle hop, and with entry nodes that knows who you are

[–] thanksforallthefish@literature.cafe 3 points 35 minutes ago

I doubt I'm more knowledgeable but the argument made is reasonable. I'm not totally convinced that trusting 2 providers is an improvement on trusting one. The point not canvassed in the article is that if Mullvad is the encrypted end point with keys then it doesn't really matter if they don't know who you are from account info, it's not very hard for them to have an unencrypted data flow split off for inspection which sooner or later will provide sufficient info to identify you.

Tl;dr if you trust mullvad deal with them directly. If you don't trust mullvad this doesn't actually fix that although it makes it harder and more effort to identify you it can still be done.

I wouldnt pay a premium over mullvad's price for this. No real value added.

[–] eremophila@lemmy.zip 2 points 10 minutes ago

"the exit hop is run by Mullvad. a respected VPM company out of Sweden."

been living under a rock?

[–] mas@feddit.fr 1 points 28 minutes ago

The same people who were asking for a Google account so they could sign up for Obscura VPN beta 🤡

[–] slacktoid@lemmy.ml 1 points 46 minutes ago

So it's a VPN, and legal bullshit to deal with jurisdictions?