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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Does VPNs even work against Big Brother apps? Using one really protects our privacy? (masking our location) (lemmy.world)

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

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am currently using Proton VPN (free tier) which is set to Always-ON and Block Connections on disable.

Today while I am going through my Gmail security option, on the devices/sessions I found my real location mentioned over there. Even when I use desktop I always connect to VPN.

On this issue I got couple of doubts:

Is this because I am using a free tier VPN? so it's not functioning properly etc...
Else google fixed my location based on my previous location history? I used my google applications without VPN for many years, I am just learning & following privacy tips recently.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Others have said all the important things, but I wanted to add that there are things that Android always tunnels through a VPN, like internet connectivity checks.

So even with Always-ON and Block Connections, this will still ignore a VPN

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

there are things that Android always tunnels through a VPN

Things that are NOT tunneled through the VPN, you mean.
A VPN is colloquially called a tunnel, so saying something "tunnels through" would mean that it does go through the VPN connection.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago

One of those times where it sounded perfectly correct in my head, whoops