If so, can you explain the value aside from changing location for streaming?
The legal thing you’re doing today might not be legal tomorrow – and there’s potential for you having been recorded doing that suddenly illegal thing in the past.
I have nothing to hideI have nothing to hide TODAY
Took me a minute to find it again, but there was an excellent essay answering this question. From https://thompson2026.com/blog/deviancy-signal/ :
There’s a special kind of contempt I reserve for the person who says, “I have nothing to hide.” It’s not the gentle pity you’d have for the naive. It’s the cold, hard anger you hold for a collaborator. Because these people aren’t just surrendering their own liberty. They’re instead actively forging the chains for the rest of us. They are a threat, and I think it’s time they were told so.
…
On a societal scale, this inaction becomes a collective betrayal. The power of the Deviancy Signal is directly proportional to the number of people who live transparently. Every person who refuses to practice privacy adds another gallon of clean, clear water to the state’s pool, making any ripple of dissent … any deviation … starkly visible. This is not a passive choice. By refusing to help create a chaotic, noisy baseline of universal privacy, you are actively making the system more effective. You are failing to do your part to make the baseline all deviant, and in doing so, you make us all more vulnerable.
While your ISP can’t see everything, they can see metadata. They can see which websites you go to, which social media you use the most, where you bank, where you shop, etc. How much do you think it would take for your ISP to sell that data? If you happen to live somewhere there are laws againat that, you are slightly less at risk. Fines are only a deterrant if they’re more than what’s being offered for your data.
That being said, this only protects you against your ISP or other purely ipaddress based info gatherers. Apps/social media/websites don’t purely use ipaddresses to track you.
Sorry, I still don‘t quite understand. So if I don‘t trust my ISP, why should I trust a VPN provider? Doesn‘t the vpn provider get the same metadata?
I’m not saying you should trust every VPN provider. Some have shown to be nore trustworthy than others. Police have raided their datacenrers and not gotten anything (no logs). And they have gone to courts and said they don’t keep that info. However if you don’t trust your ISP, and purely use a VPN, the only info your ISP will get is that you use a VPN. Your encrypted bank packet that they saw before is now an encrypted vpn packet. The vpn will see the encrypted bank packet, but youmre right, you have to trust that they have more to gain by not looking and selling than they gain by selling your info and losing customers.
Encrypt DNS
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure this just encrypts your dns requests. After DNS resolution, the traffic packet headers still have destination/source ip addresses and they can reverse dns lookup the ip addresses. Might make it require a few extra steps, but they’re the ones routing the traffic. Even your VPN traffic, they can’t decrypt what’s inside the packets, but they can see your traffic going to a known Mullvad vpn address in Norway or whatever.
Correct.