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by zzzcpan 2692 days ago
With these proposals you still have to trust your ISP in addition to trusting Google and Cloudflare. You can avoid trusting all three, your ISP, Google, Cloudflare by trusting instead a single VPN provider of your choice (or a hosting provider where you can run your own VPN server).
1 comments
dagenix 2692 days ago
A VPN provider has a much better source of data to mine than just about anyone else. On top of that, figuring out which ones deserve to be trusted is near impossible.
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zzzcpan 2692 days ago
It doesn't have more data to mine than your ISP. It's not harder to figure out who to trust than with any other company. But unlike with any other company there is so much competition across the globe, that you can strategically pick specific jurisdictions and providers known to fight for your interests.
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dagenix 2692 days ago
> It doesn't have more data to mine than your ISP.

Let's say you are behind a NAT and then you sign on to your VPN. You've helpfully disambiguated yourself from everyone else behind the NAT. Let's say you head out to a coffee shop and sign in to you VPN. Your ISP can't monitor you, but your VPN provider could.

> It's not harder to figure out who to trust than with any other company.

Have you ever looked for VPN reviews? There are many sites that seem to do nothing except review VPNs. One example: https://www.trusted-vpn.com/. And its "reviews" are basically all advertising copy. So, maybe you check out a bigger name site: https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2403388,00.asp. And ... it's more advertising copy. The third sentence in the article: "Everyone ought to be using a virtual private network, or VPN, as often as possible" - which again, sounds more like an article trying to push VPN sales (with helpful affiliate links!) than to provide actual reviews.

And the thing is, let's say you do find some site that is both trustworthy and doesn't seem to be trying to push you to click an affiliate link. What can a reviewer actually tell you about how you should trust the VPN company? Basically all they can do is read the privacy policy and rate that - which is absolutely no better than believing Google or Cloudflare when they say they won't track you with their DNS servers.

So, by all means use a VPN - but don't trust it.

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