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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Can someone explain to me the advantages of using a VPN? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 day ago by shapis@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've been using one but I'm not sure what benefits I'm getting from it. I feel like the only thing happening is I'm adding a little bit of latency to all my requests for no reason.

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[–] abrahambelch@programming.dev 3 points 15 hours ago (3 children)

Genuine question: How can an ISP detect that someone is downloading illegal material if the actual content is encrypted using SSL/TLS? Is it all approximated based on the domains/IPs and the amount of data that is sent? If they can't tell with a 100% certainty, can it be used as proof when trialed in court?

[–] cmeerw@programming.dev 6 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Isn't that mainly just torrent trackers that publish your IP address and then the ISP gets a request for who was using that particular IP address. I don't think an ISP would itself be interested in detecting whether their customers download illegal content - there is no business case for them to do that.

[–] abrahambelch@programming.dev 1 points 3 hours ago

Ahh that makes sense - thanks!

[–] ExperimentalGuy@programming.dev 1 points 14 hours ago

I'm not an expert but I'm guessing unencrypted DNS requests and potentially monitoring IPs of different torrents. DNS requests would show what websites a user is going to, and then you can always see peer IPs when connected to a torrent.

[–] Tyfud@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago

The links themselves are not encrypted, only the data packets