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Comment by SamuelAdams | Hacker News Reader

See I’ve never understood the privacy argument. Who are you trying to stay private from? If it’s your local ISP, sure that could probably work. But if it’s LEO’s and the VPN provider must comply with international laws, you’re really just changing the amount of paperwork someone has to do. If the American FBI wants to see access logs for a VPN provider in Switzerland, the VPN provider must respond and comply with a subpoena or court order.

I feel like people really need to think about who they’re trying to be private from before signing up for VPN’s.

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Yes thinking about threat model is important. Some VPN providers like Mullvad have good track record to ignoring warrants, since they don't record. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35638917 https://torrentfreak.com/private-internet-access-no-logging-...

from the websites themselves actually.

with a VPS as your vpn, reddit/google/facebook/whatever all see you from a single ip, one that might change even less then your ISP's, all of your alternative accounts will all share this ip as well, and 0 other people use that ip address. basically data collection and alternative account identification becomes dead simple because your ip is basically your universal id.

you stand out as an individual, part of the "security" with things like mullvad is that you share that ip

security in depth of course, fingerprinting and stuff still exist, but if you have such a clearly unique ip address you have 0 chance

Yes, your local ISP. So they don't send you copyright infringement letters about torrenting. And the American FBI doesn't really care about that.

Also your local network, like you need to use your phone's WiFi because you don't get a good cell signal at work, but you don't want your employer seeing your personal phone activity. Same as public coffeeshops.

Do you understand the privacy argument now?

Your local ISP doesn't monitor torrenting, but copyright holders monitor torrent peer list and they send warning to ISP. If you use AWS as a front ISP, you'll get warning from AWS

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