VPN's Dirty Little Secret
Every day I hear trusted YouTubers give all sorts of reasons why I should be running a VPN to protect myself.?
Pretty compelling stuff! With massive discounts for a limited time, “Hurry! Save $268.32!” and what would seem to be a reasonable price of $3-7 per month on a two year plan, why would anyone not do this?
The dirty secret is that VPNs are used to connect you to a “trusted network,” and once on that trusted network, your network traffic is as vulnerable as it was without the VPN. Do you trust your VPN provider? Do you even know who they are? You’d better, because you’re directly exposing your machine to the VPN’s network, and they are able to see pretty much everything you’re doing online. You may think you’re getting privacy, but that may not be what you are actually getting.?
Similarly, some of the claims they make just aren’t true any longer. Almost all websites these days use TLS/HTTPS which automatically encrypt your data so you can safely do online banking or Amazon purchasing, even over a public WiFi network, without a VPN.
So that leaves using a VPN to pretend to be somewhere else. Whilst that is almost definitely not allowed in the terms of the service of most content providers, it can work. But do you really trust the VPN provider enough to even use this service?
Should You Trust Your VPN Provider?
Many VPN companies seem to have complex corporate structures or links to governments, and so may have other motives to get access to your Internet traffic. It’s tough to tell. Here’s a great video on the subject:
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If you are purchasing a VPN to change your virtual location and you are comfortable with that, then choose the VPN provider wisely. Or, simply become your own VPN provider using a machine you have at home, for example using this guide to use Atsign?’s No Ports tech.?
If you are purchasing a VPN for privacy, then forgo the cost of a VPN—just make sure you see the padlock when browsing, ensure encryption from you to the web server and make sure you have a firewall switched on your machine. But remember that the owner of the web server can see all of your data. It might seem obvious to some, but even though facebook.com uses HTTPS, Facebook can still see all your data and activities on their site in the clear. The same is true with every service on the Internet; the server sees the data in the clear, the email server sees your email, the file server sees all your files. It’s wise to assume that the people who run those servers can see it, too.
If you think people should be able to communicate privately without companies in the middle seeing your data, we are with you on that. Atsign? was started to solve this problem, offering both the underlying technology and a great solution, SSH No Ports, built on top of that technology.
Using our open-source technology, two companies, people, or things can exchange data over the Internet using a server called an atServer. The atServer cannot see the data, because the data is encrypted with keys the atServer never has. Atsign provides true end-to-end encryption, not to a centralized server where your data is in the clear, but instead to the two devices being used by two people to communicate.
Atsign still uses TCP/IP, the Internet for transport of data, and we allow two end points to communicate with each other with full encryption without the need of a VPN.?
For more information about SSH No Ports or Atsign’s underlying technology, visit NoPorts.com? or email us at [email protected].
Former Director UBS - Service Management/Network Operations
11 个月Had not thought about the vpn providers network really..??