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 2 months ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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] 4 points 2 months ago (8 children)

It won't make any difference. It actually could potentially make you more fingerprintable, since your IP adress is no longer shared with many other people depending on the VPN you're using, etc.

At the end of the day, VPNs are not necessary to be not tracked, since your IP adress changes regulary, but it can be helpful in some scenario's and it's not harmful either, aslong your provider is not a bad actor.

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

aaaa

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Oh okay, never heard of this since it's very unsual to give static IPs to people, especially since IPv4 adresses are very limited in their amount.

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