On Mon, 2021-06-21 at 22:54 +0200, Carlos E. R. wrote:
On 21/06/2021 05.05, Douglas McGarrett wrote:
I have had some evidence of a lack of privacy in my system, and I have a couple of questions. This lack of privacy is a function of the internet, not some person having physical access to the computer.
I realize that a vpn will definitely work with email, but will it
work
with Thunderbird? And will it work with vendors on the 'net? Can one access (for example) Amazon, peruse a category and purchase an item from them via vpn? Is it vendor neutral, so it works with any vendor of any type of product?
A VPN will work with all of that, sure, but your ISP, Amazon, all vendors, will know it is is you who is connecting, nothing will be hidden from them.
The only thing different is that they will think your computer is at a different place. And that your ISP will not see the traffic. But neither will it see the traffic if you connect to all sites using https protocol (on the browser). You also need to make sure your email connections are encrypted (many are not).
As many have said before - The problem, as described, does not seem to be caused by the lack of VPN, thus not solvable by VPN. That being said - if your problem is privacy and ISP monitoring and selling your internet traffic patterns - VPN would prevent ISP from analyzing your traffic in detail. Because of wider audience: Other posts suggested that https is enough to make your traffic secure/private. It should be pointed out that it is not necessarily true for standard web pages. ISPs have pretty good idea where and what you are accessing on the internet https or not. ISPs (US ones for sure) buy/generate https traffic signatures for frequently accessed web sites. VPN hides that level of detail from them and they only broadly recognize if you are browsing web, reading emails or streaming media - not necessarily the traffic source/destination. Content of your emails, webforms, files sent/received, passwords, etc. is about the only content ISP cannot observe in the https traffic. This is not applicable to Dough, but is should be noted that VPNs are illegal and outright dangerous to use in certain jurisdictions. Violence and or incarceration or the thread of it can be pretty effective tools for decrypting traffic, obtaining passwords, etc. -Tomas