This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Do personal VPN services (anonymizers) help home user defenses?

Occasional questions in this forum are of the form, "How do I force all traffic through a VPN Tunnel?"   Gradually, I have inferred that most of these questions are home users who want to use anonymization services because they think it will make them more secure, which I doubt.   However, the possibility remains that a bad guy will want to couple UTM for defense with anonymization for attacks, and I don't want this forum to help any such bad actors.   Therefore, I suggest to the moderators that those questions be removed and in the future be ruled out of order.

The related question is whether they help with home security.   Presumably, the primary reason for using them is to confuse web tracking services, which the UTM log shows to be ubiquitous.  An anonymizer prevents a tracking site from estimating your geographic location from your IP address, but there are many other ways that this can be estimated.  We reveal at least our preferred language on every web request.   We reveal our country of residence by the sites to which we connect -- if you use a global company's website, you have to pick your country to get correct information, and if you only connect to companies in your own country, you reveal your country indirectly.   Of course, if you ever use a store locator to find a store near you, or ever use a website to display directions, you have also revealed information about your location.

One has to ask about the motivation and funding sources for the anonymization service, since everything costs money.   How does one know that the anonymization service is not provided by the tracking services we want to avoid?   If a tracking service has 10% coverage of the sites you visit, there is a lot that they still want to know.   Google knows about all of you web searches, but Google's competitors do not.   If you are kind enough to use the tracking service's anonymization site, they can track 100% of your activity, including your Google searches!

Everything, including an anonymization service, costs money to operate.  I am heavily influenced the modern proverb which says, "If something is free to you, then you are the product!"  I respectfully suggest that it is time to discard the notion that they might be our friends.

The two biggest threats to personal networks are hostile email and hostile websites.   I don't see that an anonymization service will help with either threat.  



This thread was automatically locked due to age.
Parents
  • To revive this point:   a friend just made me aware of news feeds that confirm my suspicions.   Since I don't think this forum allows off-post links, simply do a web search for:

    "be cautious free vpns are selling your data to 3rd parties"

    Several sites have links about the research.   Apparently GDPR helped expose the problem.

    Caveat Emptor.   "If the product is free, then maybe YOU are the product"

Reply
  • To revive this point:   a friend just made me aware of news feeds that confirm my suspicions.   Since I don't think this forum allows off-post links, simply do a web search for:

    "be cautious free vpns are selling your data to 3rd parties"

    Several sites have links about the research.   Apparently GDPR helped expose the problem.

    Caveat Emptor.   "If the product is free, then maybe YOU are the product"

Children
No Data