this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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Excuse me for my lack of understanding, but why are there so many people looking to hide their traffic from their ISP with a VPN? Isn't HTTPS enough? Are you afraid of ISPs resorting to DPI or MiM to spy on their users? Is customer protection so weak in the US that ISPs are free to spy on their customers using aforementioned techniques?
Edit: I just realized that I left out people leaving under authoritarian regimes, for whom VPNs are unfortunately required to evade their government.
ISPs not only sell cell location data to bounty hunters/anyone who can fork over money, they also sell ad targeting information about their customer. They have also injected Javascript into pages (selling new modems) and add(ed) unique headers to HTTP traffic so websites could identify individual users despite their best attempts.
Not all of them do all of this crap, but this shit is one of the reasons Mozilla enabled DoH in the USA by default. It also helped the push for getting HTTPS everywhere.
This must have been pre-HTTPS since you'd need to MitM the SSL certificate for that to work
Because HTTPS protects only things you do on the site. ISP still knows which sites you connect to. Which YouTube video you are watching to. etc. F.E. in Russia ISP's have to keep logs of users interactions for half of year and give it to government when they need them.
Your ISP won't know what video you're watching, only that you're accessing data from youtube.com and other domain names.
That's not a problem for most generic websites, but authoritarian governments probably won't like you visiting any domain that looks like wikileaks.com or voanews.com.
My opinion. I can't trust any government on this planet anymore. So much fuck ups and stupid decisions. So basically every government is kinda authoritarian for me...
Yes, because they know the IPs your packets go to, but if there are multiple websites behind a single IP they won't know which one (unless you use your ISP DNS server, which you should probably not)
No, because the URL is contained within the HTTP packets which are encrypted with SSL (the S in HTTPS), so unless the ISP does MiM, they cannot know which URL you are visiting.
That's not true. Almost all TLS clients use SNI to send the server name in plaintext, so the server can present the right certificate. With QUIC/http3, this is no longer done in plaintext, but the packet is still being sent alongside the initial encryption key so anyone with access to the traffic can simply decrypt these packets.
There are trials out there for ESNI/ECH, which encrypts the SNI fields in a way the ISP can't read, but those are far from stable, not implemented by most web servers, not enabled by default by web browsers, and require additional setup for website admins (read: won't be widely implemented for another five to ten years).
The URL and Host header are encrypted of course. Your ISP can find out you're going to youtube.com, but not what video you're watching.
Oh, thanks for this precision, I wasn't aware of this. And now that I think of it, it's obvious that the first exchange with a server has to be unencrypted
Hmm... You have way better knowledge than I am. It seems so. Should think about this things some time later 😉
To me, the problem is you are instead giving over all of your info to the VPN company, and still be tracked by other means such as fingerprinting of devices, cookies/site data or browsing patterns. Is some random VPN company more trustworthy than my ISP and who’s to say they aren’t sharing the information? Plus, the could also be subpoenaed/NSLed if that’s the concern.
I'd be more willing to trust a VPN company with this data than an ISP. The former's entire business hinges on providing privacy to their customers while the latter can just sell your data to whoever they want and most people wouldn't bat an eye.
I'd have plenty of questions about the VPN company though. Some of these would be the same as ISPs, some worse for VPN companies.
Legitimate questions, but why would it be worse for VPN companies?
The way I see it, I have no way of verifying the answers to any of these regardless of whether it's an ISP or a VPN, but I do know that VPNs have a greater incentive to provide you with proper privacy because if they were found to fail at this, the entire business dies. ISPs run no such risk, especially since many of them are effectively monopolies.
Because my ISP stopped my internet access last time they were contacted by a copyright holder whose thing I torrented.