I'm ready to give up on VPNs

Lounge EndeavourOS pub
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Rant ahoy:

I’ve been using paid VPNs for several years now. In that time, it’s become clear to me that using a VPN makes me an enemy of practically every online entity between me and the websites/services I use, and usually also an enemy those websites/services themselves. VPN usage is easily identified: to keep a record of VPN servers, all a censor/surveillance entity needs to do is pay for access to the VPN and see what computers the client talks to.

As time has gone on, the internet has gotten ever-more intolerant of VPNs. I’ve tried many services. I’ve tried using their “obfuscation” services, and I’ve tried rotating servers, but it’s gotten to the point where I have to have the VPN off like 20% of the time. I have to turn it off to log into eBay, turn it off again to track a package on USPS, change servers three times when visiting reddit, turn it off to look at THE WEBSITE OF A VPN PROVIDER, definitely turn it off to check the consent box for public wifi, etc. etc. Many multiplayer games refuse to work over a VPN, which is manageable on Windows because most VPN clients allow you exempt specific programs from the VPN, but on linux this is only possible by launching the needed program from a menu in the VPN client, which ranges from horribly cumbersome to outright impossible.

What’s worse, the VPN clients themselves are very flawed. Sometimes they don’t tolerate changing wifi networks. Other times they fail spontaneously. Sometimes they fail spontaneously, and also kill the wifi connection, so even disconnecting from the VPN doesn’t restore internet service.

People often say, “If you really care, set up your own VPN on a remote server.” I’m sure that works for getting around censorship, but it isn’t anonymous at all: my traffic is still identifiable, it’s just that “my computer” is somewhere geographically separate from my meat body. I actually want my traffic mixed in with the traffic of a bunch of strangers.

One thing that VPNs do seem to work for reliably is torrents. The cost of a VPN is well worth having torrents available to me, so I think that I will keep a cheap subscription, but I’m now fairly sure that the anonymity of my regular traffic is already fatally compromised by having to turn off the VPN so much, and by the fact that I regularly log into web services, including google. I’m now prepared to content myself with the modicum of cloaking provided by Brave Browser and Linux itself. If anyone has come up with a foolproof traffic-obfuscating technique, though, I’d love to hear it.

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Strange that you have not mentioned any of the VPNs you’ve used by name. Could easily be an issue with the ones you use or the websites themselves, like logging into Google for anything personal.

Anyway, to address the actual issue:

It is not that you should stop using VPNs because sites are identifying them and banning them.

The issue is that sites are allowed to do this in the first place. Requiring you to show them your real IP, and by extension, your physical location, should not be allowed.

There needs to be laws against this, and you and everyone who uses VPNs (myself included) should bring this up before, during, and after election time in our respective countries or regions.

At least, this is my opinion. I just believe that privacy advocacy should not be limited to oneself, or it will eventually become pointless if/when laws are implemented against it.

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Maybe not so strange? Maybe you didn’t for privacy? Giving you an out here.

From my experience, I’ve tried all the popular VPNs, except for CyberGhost, and I noticed that most don’t work as advertised. When I had an Instagram account, as an example, none of the popular ones blocked the in-app ads like they said they would.

Once I started using the privacy-respecting ones, like Mullvad, Proton, Windscribe, etc. ads actually got blocked in-app.

I’d say that’s a clear sign of a compromised VPN if it can’t block ads from big companies on Android devices. Or could just be a coincidence — something I don’t believe in. :grimacing:

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I still cannot find a actually good reason to use a VPN beside two exceptions: Your OWN VPN (to connect into your own network via a different network, eg the internet) and getting around a geo block - that’s all. The first one I actually use, the latter one I do not need. VPNs are bad for privacy, and that is why I advice to not use them.

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I’m familiar with the pain @AidanofVT.

The irony, is some sites that block due to VPN, won’t block you if you throw a TOR connection in there too, like Reddit. You use Brave, so that’s just a matter of opening the link in a TOR window.

eBay is a pain. It’s so bad I’ve given up entirely on my account and any purchase I make is done as a guest.

For the most part though, if a trivial site or service is going to be a pain about it, I’m far less inclined to revisit said site or service.

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I have tried ExpressVPN, IVPN, Nord VPN, and Mullvad. I found the performance of these services, and their frustrations, to be fairly similar.

I appreciate your emphasis on ad blocking, but I use Brave so ads are taken care of anyway. I also agree with your stance against geo-checking, morally, but I live in the USA, so preventing that really isn’t in the public consciousness or the regulatory Overton Window.

You also remind me of another aspect of these services which works relatively well: the Android clients. They’re always the best. They still fail to access large portions of the internet, but that’s less of an issue on my phone, since I don’t use it for browsing. The Android apps seldom break like the Linux apps do, and handle things like wifi/cellular changes without complaint.

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The options are:

  • Trust your ISP, and present your actual IP address to every service you connect to.
  • Trust your VPN, and hide your actual IP address from every service you connect to.

Trust is necessary in either case, but at least with a VPN, you don’t also have to trust every service you connect to with your actual IP address.

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This is essentially my conclusion, too: most of the time, a VPN is not worth the trouble, but having the option of using a VPN is worth the small amount of money and effort it takes to keep a subscription.

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You have to trust your ISP anyway, even if you use the VPN. They still have the meta data, and that is often worse than the actual data, AND they are regulated and observed - a VPN ain’t. So that alone is a HUGE loss in privacy. I do not use services that I do not trust. If you do something like that and need privacy and security, go freenet or tor. VPNs suck at that notoriously. O, and btw: Worthless if you are using Android or ios.

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This right here. If I am not making money from the site, and it blocks me because I use a VPN, then the site no longer exists for me.

How so? I’ve done the checks for ad-blocking and IP masking, and Android devices plus a proper VPN actually make a difference from my experience.

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I personally see no reason to be concerned about that. The meta data that can be gleaned from a client connecting to a VPN is fairly inconsequential.

Granted, the story might be different for one living in a country where VPN activity is outlawed, or the person is trying to hide illegal activity.

If you’re happy to share, I’d like to know more about this too @milkytwix.

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Because most Android Apps are full of trackers, and Android itself is also tracking. The vendor of the device is tracking on top of that. All that metadata breaks the privacy of the vpn.

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Ah. Something can be done about that, at least on Android. GrapheneOS for example. The choice of apps used is also important.

There is still the hardware layer of course, which remains a mystery. If we’re to take that into account, then every thing we connect to the Internet with is in the same basket, as it all contains closed source hardware.

Risc-V may be the closest thing to a truly open option, at least as far as the processor is concerned.

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I get this:

But I strongly disagree with this:

I don’t live in the US. In the last election years ago, IG started showing “Vote now” banner ads to me because they thought I was in the US. The banner ads were unskippable, of course, as they were built-in, not an added service.

At the time, I was also testing WeVPN and Proton. Whenever I used WeVPN, I didn’t get the banner ads for voting, but when I used Proton, I did.

Is that not evidence of an Android VPN actually working?

To confirm, in case you are unaware, Android has a setting called “mock location”. I always have this turned on based on the current VPN I am using.

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I appreciate the discussion @milkytwix :+1:

The points you raise are important considerations. Perhaps to some, a VPN may seem like a silver bullet solution, which it never truly is.

If I use a VPN, but surf the web from a Windows PC, or an as purchased Android/iOS phone, using Chrome, signed into the likes of Google and Facebook, then any notion of privacy is a lost cause.

There’s more to privacy than just a VPN of course, which is at least one of the reasons many people are here using a Linux distro, I suspect.

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Most of the difficulties you describe MAY be attributed o your choice of VPN provider. NONE of these pop up on my usage, and, should I run into a difficulty, it has provision for connecting without the VPN on an app-by-app basis (all your choice). Most decent Linux VPN’s allow this, which adds to my suspicion of which one you use. Was it a ‘free’ one perchance?

The one I use has been trouble-free for years, despite ‘warnings’ I get from others all the time. IF it is dubious in some way, in this amount of time I would think I would have seen a downside by now - if only in my email! Anyway - functional VPS’s do exist out there, just put some research time in…

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I’m not sure if this distinction is important for the sake of this discussion or not, but just to clarify: the sites and services you are finding which do not work when using your VPN typically don’t care about the actual VPN itself. That is to say, they are not anti-VPN, and are not blocking your web traffic just because you are using a VPN.

Rather, it is the abuse of VPNs by spammers, scammers, hackers, and so on which causes this issue. If a company finds their website is getting slammed with spam or hacking efforts all coming from XYZ VPN, typically there isn’t much they can do about it except block the IP ranges that XYZ VPN provides.

For sites that are especially prone to being overrun with spam like Reddit, or sites like eBay where bad actors are constantly setting up scam accounts, blocking traffic from the VPNs that facilitate attacks like this may be the lesser of two evils. If the sites get completely overrun with spam, scam accounts, or get hacked then all users of those sites have a bad experience instead of just those who want to actually use the VPNs for their intended use.

I mean honestly, Reddit and eBay are already bad enough in this regard. Personally I don’t blame them for trying to do something to try and take the curse off a bit.

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See above for which VPNs I have tried. They include some of the most expensive and privacy-zealous services. I have “put some research time in.” I would love to experience the carefree VPN experience you have found, if you would care to share what service you are enjoying?

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A lot of people here would disagree with this, but I frankly see no point in using a VPN unless you absolutely must use one to circumvent government restrictions or do sail the seven seas legally because a streaming service region locks certain things for you (I did that with Crunchyroll until I realized that it makes no sense to watch something at an inferior quality that is already legion locked when I could go further in the seas and find whatever I wanted in a better package that what Crunchyroll offered)

Privacy wise, you route your connections to a company which may or may not track what you do. Doing it yourself takes time and effort and constant tinkering, which is nice sometimes, but when you need to actually do something and it doesn’t work, it can become deeply annoying.

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I used a few different VPN’s trueout the years like:
ExpressVPN(before thy sold out), NordVPN, IVPN, and for a long time now Mullvad VPN(witch has worked great! For my needs, mainly kill off stupid Geo restrictions).