If there's a single worst piece of advice on how to protect your online privacy, it'll be without a doubt using a VPN.I can't even count how many time I've seen this advice all over the internet;
How do I stop google from tracking me?
How do I buy weed online anonymously?
How to not get caught watching porn
This advice is honestly so bad it's borderline malicious or just plain stupid. People who follow up on it end up with a false sense of security at best or even in a worse situation than without a VPN at worst.
VPN are so prevalent nowadays yet they have never been so unnecessary. The market is incredibly saturated with VPN providers and Vpn ads are so common right now there are more sponsorship deal for VPN than there were for Squarespace.
I don't have a problem with people promoting VPNs or trying to make money with VPN affiliate link I have a problem with how VPN are being sold to people and how damaging this marketing practice actually is.
Today I wanna bust some of the most common False and damaging myths about VPNs.
You can still a VPN if you want to but do so for the right reasons and with the right expectations.I used Vpn also but i used it knowing their limitations and adjusting my behaviour accordingly.
Vpn certainly does have their use cases but none of them involves wearing an anonymous mask. Everybody knows you wear a mask to serve the dark web.
Myth #1:Vpn Makes You Anonymous
The most common and deceptive claim I've seen is using a VPN makes you instantly anonymous. Let me phrase it this way; how can you claim to be anonymous if there is a group of people you never seen that knows who you are, where you are and what you are doing online.
Many Vpn providers make Big claims about hiding your IP address which supposed to make it impossible for someone to see your traffic or known your true IP address except for the Vpn provider they get to see your Ip address and what servers you request if Edward Snowden used a VPN to leak the NSA documents he'd get caught before he even thought about stealing the documents.
Yet very few VPN providers are actually honest about the fact they are your single point of failure and those that are making broad marketing claims about no logs policy which doesn't actually means anything because every network operator keeps some logs for at least some period of time.
Just like private instant messaging claiming they have no metadata policy that's impossible. Some basic information about your request has to travel through their servers and you'll never have a chance to find out what they actually keep and for how long unless they are kind enough to disclose that information in plain English somewhere in their privacy policies.
Even if your VPN provider does everything right and they delete all the logs immediately from their records even then you are still entitled to have no expectations of anonymity. Using you're only rerouting your traffic through a single entity advanced observers like ISP companies Google Amazon or government can easily correlate the timing between you making a connection to a VPN server with that server making a connection to a website you want to see.
VPN technology does nothing to mitigate these correlation attacks. Anonymity with VPNs is technologically impossible.
Myth #2: VPNs Should Be Used With Tor
This is another common myth that's also frequently marketed by VPNs themselves as either being tor compatible or going as far as including tor into the Vpn itself.
Combining Tor over a VPN is useful to hide tor usage from ISP or circumventing censorship of the tor network but tor bridges also do this without reliance on a VPN's single pint of failure and payment trail.
As for Vpn over Tor, this will help correlate all of your traffic to a single VPN IP address and break the Tor anonymity model also making it a hard thing to recommend. the reality is if you don't know what you are doing you should probably not combine tor wit a VPN.
The complexity of this is pretty thorough and there are several configurations with different pros and cons which you should bother with unless you absolutely need to and know what you are doing.
Tor itself is a great tool that will more than protect almost every threat model and a VPN doesn't need to be part of that equation.
This applies to a VPN that offers tor over VPN just don't use it.
Used the Vpn when you wanna use the VPN and just use tor when using tor.
Myth #3: VPN Encrypt Your Traffic
This myth you will endlessly hear and it that VPN encrypts your traffic and not just using any encryption it's military-grade encryption but guest what it not 2004 any more and almost anything today is encrypted by default.
And all thanks to Edward Snowden when he revealed the secret documents about NSA surveillance and when everybody freaked out as a result and started encrypting everything.
And Vpn encryption is doing to change anything because VPN can encrypt and decrypt your traffic so when your packets leave a VPN server they lose all the shiny military protection you were duped tp pay for.
Myth #4: VPN protect Your Identity
This myth comes as a result of constant bombardment of false marking performed by Vpn companies claiming to make you anonymous hide your identity promise immediate privacy and security and more.
The Two main things of Vpn Does; Hide you IP Adress from the site you visit and encrypt your traffic withing its tunnel which the last myth covered.
Very well nice bro