this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Privacy
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I don't. Your ISP can hardly see anything you do online. Almost all websites are encrypted with HTTPS and if you are concerned about them seeing what domains you visit you can just change your dns server to quad9 or something else privacy respecting. A more valid usecase for VPN is preventing websites from tracking you IP address, downloading "Linux ISO's" or bypassing geographical blocks and for that I used mullvad but I am looking for something else now that they blocked port forwarding.
Yup. An ISP could potentially gain some information based on the IPs you're hitting and the number/frequency of packets sent and received, but that would take serious logging and analysis on their part. It's much easier to collect data through DNS requests.
@just_browsing
@cow DPI would probably be easier.
Deep packet inspection by definition requires the ability to see inside the packet, which if using HTTPS wouldn't be possible for your ISP.
They can still see the destination IP, return IP, and port number, but that's it. It would take a ton of storage to log all of that packet data though, and it'd be difficult to come up with a way not to double count it if it's going through multiple hops on the ISP network.
Logging DNS requests on the DNS server would be a much easier way of collecting that data if they wanted it. I know cloudflare collects aggregate DNS query data through their public DNS server, and Google likely does too.
@just_browsing I was just bullshitting. Sure, they would need a proxy of sorts and a certificate to open your packages if you use HTTPS. I suppose the only thing that can help with carrier surveillance is a good VPN or TOR. But even then, the VPN provider is a problem in and of itself.