Just out of curiosity do you use a VPN, I always browse with a VPN on my phone for precisely that reason and am wondering if it actually works to help protect my privacy.
Generally speaking, this makes me feel a better when using mobile data or any foreign network (public, friends, work, etc) since I know all of my outbound requests are coming from "one location".
I can reroute outbound access to an external VPN if/when needed, but it's really a crapshoot for who you trust to keep track of your outbound requests. I don't trust any VPN out there to be strong enough to say "NO" to an intrusive 3rd-party like the US gov. No more than my own ISP at least.
For someone overly paranoid about tracking, I would probably suggest just using Tor, but for basic consolidation of internet access, routing through a self-hosted VPN at home works great.
I suspect a VPN user would show up in the Verizon data file with many large TCP sessions to a very small number of IPs.
Just curious, how many captchas do you solve with this setup daily? Or even IP bans?
I did exactly the same thing once and it was so annoying.
I set up a VPN on a Digital Ocean instance and got captchas all the time on various websites, especially ones using CloudFlare etc (I’m aware of Privacy Pass but didn’t bother setting it up as it was a temporary thing)
That said, if you're using your own EC2/lightsail instance you won't see as many CAPTCHAs as, say, using a commodity VPN service.
Given you can't detect a VPN per-se (if configured properly) usually the way it works is that the destination node knows you're coming from a source IP from a known VPN-supplier's well-known IP-block.
If you go for this kind of setup (running your own VPN on AWS) you're simply changing your ISP to Amazon. They still might (and probably will) be monitoring egress traffic at the very least to perform any kind of incident analysis.
Lightsail costs $3.50/mo with 1tb transfer bundled or $5/mo with 2tb.
If your setup is scripted then it probably makes sense to switch over to save a bit of cash. Others following the same path could save some money by using Lightsail as opposed to EC2.
I personally use lightsail for most always on things and then just use ec2 for on demand workloads, because it works out far cheaper (these are just random personal projects so I'm heavily optimising for low cost)
You can't configure the lightsail instances as much as an EC2 instance, but otherwise it's essentially the same product (both operated by AWS).
I'm curious if other have done the same.