They’re trying to track our IP address. We were so careful, how could they find us? VPNs are often considered an essential part of your toolbox if you want to live a modern and privacy-friendly lifestyle. 2 IT security experts I spoke with have repeatedly pointed out that VPNs are not a privacy tool at all, because the VPN company is able to see everything you do.
It seems that if you want to have real privacy or security with a Virtual Private Networks, you have to configure your own, but this is not something that the average person has the technical know-how to do. So what is the solution for most people? Should we avoid commercial VPNs altogether? Not necessarily. In fact, there are several reasons why a consumer VPN could be useful to you.
Let’s see what you have for us VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, and it is a private network within a public network like the Internet, to connect remote sites or users together. Someone could set up one of these private networks for their employees who work remotely, so that they can share information within their company securely while using the infrastructure of the Internet. Virtual Private Networks can also be used by anyone who wants an additional layer of protection on their Internet use.
For example, if you use public wifi in a cafe on an unsecured network, a Virtual Private Networks is actually a good way to hide your traffic from other people on the network, it encrypts your data when it passes over the Internet, so even if it is intercepted, the data cannot be read,anyone who uses public wifi in an airport or a cafe would be wise to use a VPN.
VPNs are also a way to protect your online activities from being registered by your Internet service provider, Yes, without a Virtual Private Network, your Internet service provider, your ISP, can see which domain names you have connected to. There can be very good reasons to hide them. Or to prevent the site you are visiting from seeing your IP address
The IP address is short for Internet Protocol address, and it gives your device an identity when it is connected to a network like the Internet to allow it to communicate with other devices on the network. Normally, when you connect directly to a website, they see your IP address.
If you use a VPN, your data is first sent server before being sent over the Internet and to the site you are trying to reach. Thus, the website only sees the IP address of your Virtual Private Networks provider.
IP addresses are not necessarily location-specific, but over time they have been more or less accurately mapped to physical locations, so using a VPN can help you hide your physical location from the websites you visit. Also, if the VPN server is located in another country, it can be a way to trick websites into thinking that you are in that country.
Thus, some people use VPNs to spoof their location and help them access sites banned in their own country, such as Netflix or crypto exchanges. Now, not all VPNs are created in the same way. A lot of what I’m seeing is simply a combination of clever marketing and consumer confusion about how virtual private networks and the Internet more broadly work.
A big part of evaluating a Virtual Private Network provider is understanding how they make money and how responsibly they handle the data first rule :
If it’s free, you’re probably getting your money’s worth. As they say “If you don’t pay for the product, you are usually the product”, and many VPNs will make money by recording unencrypted internet activity and selling the data. Even if they promise not to, it’s hard to verify. Then the location of the VPN provider may be important to consider.
ProtonVPN :
For example, a French activist was recently arrested after the email provider Protonmail was forced by law enforcement agencies to register his IP address.
However, if the same user used ProtonVPN, his IP address would have remained private because ProtonVPN is based in Switzerland which has no logging obligation for VPNs. While some countries such as Switzerland have good laws regarding VPNs, many others require VPNs to report all the activities of their users and hand over the logs to law enforcement agencies.
Even if the country has “no logging” policies by default, many governments can actually force VPNs to connect following a direct order, such as a national security letter to the United States. However, under the current Swiss legal framework, the Swiss government is not in a position to force Virtual Private Networks providers to start recording IP addresses. While good VPN jurisdictions and bad jurisdictions are worth considering, they should also be taken with a grain of salt.
There are many complex alliances for data sharing between countries, such as mutual legal assistance treaties.
Most PRIVATE VPN’s ?
The EU countries have data sharing agreements, the 5 eyes too. But even if a country is not a member of the 5 Eyes, or of the European Union, there is a lot of cooperation between the law enforcement agencies of different countries for the transmission of data, so many people wonder how useful the location of a VPN is at the end of the day. This brings me to the next important criteria for choosing a VPN: logging policies, Facebook is asking its users to download an onava VPN.
Even if you are not on Facebook at that exact moment, they will still track your browser, you want to choose one with “no logging” or “low logging” guarantees.
This legally prevents a Virtual Private Networks from keeping records of your activity beyond a certain period of time. This means that they cannot actually transmit your information on request, because they do not have it. ProtonVPN’s strict no-logging policy was tested in a court case in 2019 where they were ordered to hand over logs to help identify a user, and were unable to comply because such logs did not exist.
Finally, the technology used by the Virtual Private Networks is crucial,There are all kinds of different technical standards that can be used when a company sets up its VPN service.
They may be deliberately using weaker encryption standards, or sometimes the core of a Virtual Private Network is in the right place, but they may simply not have the technical know-how to protect your data. On top of that, governments around the world are constantly trying to hack VPNs.
The NSA’s Office of Target Tracking maintains a team of engineers dedicated to cracking encrypted VPN traffic.
But some standards, regardless of other compromising factors, seem safer than others.
The Press Freedom Foundation, of which Snowden is the president, recommends using a service with the following VPN configuration: Authentication is the process used to confirm that you are the VPN client and not someone who is trying to impersonate you.
And they recommend SHA256 The “handshake” defines the encryption keys for your VPN session, and they recommend using RSA 4096 or at least RSA 2048 And a “data encryption” cipher uses these keys for the actual encryption of data when it passes through a VPN connection, and they recommend using AES-256-GCM or AES-256-CBC brain explode All this sounds very confusing, but you don’t need to understand how it all works, and the technical specifications of a provider They should all be available on their website.
According to press freedom, if they don’t use these encryption standards, they must have a good reason. But again, take this with a grain of salt because even if your VPN provider tries to create robust security, there are myriad ways to compromise this. Even with a Virtual Private Network, you can’t guarantee that your carrier isn’t tracking you.
There are many layers on the Internet and each one needs privacy protections.
Transport-level security (highlighting) does not entail application-level security. Before we drown in the technical details, here are some currently recommended services. Remember that companies modify their products and that new research is carried out constantly that changes the standards of what is considered “secure”.
But at the moment, there are 5 VPNs according to the press freedom foundation, currently meet their criteria: But keep an eye on the sources you trust, such as press freedom, so that you can continue to make good choices about your privacy as the available information changes.
NordVPN :
One of the most popular VPN options, i contacted their expert David Huerta about this, who confirmed that although Nord *seems* to have a secure OpenVPN implementation and a reasonable no-logging policy, they have had poor handling of security breach disclosures in the past, While they have started publishing semi-regular audits, the most recent ones cover things like applications, but not the server infrastructure which is the most likely vector of a big hack, a breach or a broken political promise.
The other strange choice they have made is to only make these audit reports available to existing customers, unlike recommended VPNs that make all audit reports available to potential customers before they press the buy button.
So Nord could also be a reasonable choice, but there are some hesitations on the side of Nord’s business practices, so David had a hard time recommending them, especially when those on the list tick the right boxes and go further on transparency.
A few more caveats about VPNs: Your own location can be very important when choosing to use a Virtual Private Network.
The great Chinese firewall has shut down a popular Virtual Private Network because it is illegal in some countries like Russia and China, using a Virtual Private Network in one of these countries can actually make you stand out more. Keep that in mind.
And finally, you can only know so much about one of these Virtual Private Network providers with sufficient certainty. Even a lot of their transparency is self-reported, so at some point you always take these companies for their words.
Conclusion :
Many security experts do not recommend VPNs at all, do not think that it offers you protection, it was not originally designed to be a privacy tool.
So understand your own threat model before using them.
That being said, for use cases such as work situations, IP obfuscation and adding extra protection to an unsecured wireless Internet connection, VPNs can certainly be a useful tool to help you live a modern and privacy-friendly lifestyle.
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