Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Disable VPN while browsing casual or leave running? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Hey guys n gurls, I was wondering if it is smart to disable my VPN connection for casual browsing.

Reasons: when having VPN constantly running it may be possible to track me via browser fingerprinting.

Szenario: the connection coming from the VPN which hypothetically downloaded a torrent, tries to watch capitalist propaganda while living in China, etc.pp has this screen ratio, this locale, this addons etc. And (more important) the YouTube login cookie we know belongs to this physical person/telephone number etc.

So I am wondering if I should only use the VPN when "needing" it (read articles not available in country, Netflix, read information government doesn't like, things like that.) Or if I'm missing something here and I could obscure my causal day to day browsing as well without decreasing the security of the VPN.

For reference, the VPN doesn't log anything (for more than a day) to my knowledge

EDIT: From what I understand from the comments: switching the VPN has little to no impact on widely used tracking and if at all makes it easier to corelate data. People emphasize the general lack of full privacy if you are wanted by entities willing to spend enough resources. But for the general need of privacy in normal usecases it makes more sense to just leave the VPN running.

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[–] Jean_le_Flambeur@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 6 months ago

It was, that was the kind of information I needed, as it helps to differentiate what kind/level of privacy I have and what kind/level of privacy different actors can circumvent etc.

As I am mostly looking at not generating useful data for shitcompanies like amazon, google, Microsoft etc. The always onvpn and no cookies except YouTube should be more than sufficient. If my country decides that my political opinion is no longer permitted I should nevertheless be using Tor and check if I'm unique (fingerprint wise).