A secret program called "Project Ghostbusters" saw Facebook devise a way to intercept and decrypt the encrypted network traffic of Snapchat users to study their behavior.
That’s debatable. In my estimation, by using a “service vpn” you’re giving advertisers some other kind of demographic information, namely that you’re the kind of person that pays for a vpn.
Is that better or worse than giving advertisers the data point that you’re high-tech knowledgable and browse personal accounts from a server in a datacenter?
Yeah, that’s why I think it’s debatable. It’s a lot easier to make those decisions on traffic coming from a known vpn ip, versus all vps providers in the world - many of which have corporate uses.
On the other hand - if you’re smart enough to set up a vpn, you’ll also be smart enough to set up ad blocking, so the point is kinda moot anyway. Plus you’ll be a lot less likely to have your traffic logged opposed to a service vpn.
That’s true. I’d only use a VPN service that’s been audited (either by a security company or, preferably, law enforcement) not to keep logs. There are only a small handful of those however. It really all depends on your needs. There are far more VPN services that do log and sell the data, and/or turn your host device into a proxy for other users/services.
This only works if you don’t want the privacy enhancing aspect of advertisers not tying your activity to an IP address.
Beyond more safely using open Wi-Fi or bypassing a censoring ISP, there isn’t much reason there.
That’s debatable. In my estimation, by using a “service vpn” you’re giving advertisers some other kind of demographic information, namely that you’re the kind of person that pays for a vpn.
Is that better or worse than giving advertisers the data point that you’re high-tech knowledgable and browse personal accounts from a server in a datacenter?
Yeah, that’s why I think it’s debatable. It’s a lot easier to make those decisions on traffic coming from a known vpn ip, versus all vps providers in the world - many of which have corporate uses.
On the other hand - if you’re smart enough to set up a vpn, you’ll also be smart enough to set up ad blocking, so the point is kinda moot anyway. Plus you’ll be a lot less likely to have your traffic logged opposed to a service vpn.
That’s true. I’d only use a VPN service that’s been audited (either by a security company or, preferably, law enforcement) not to keep logs. There are only a small handful of those however. It really all depends on your needs. There are far more VPN services that do log and sell the data, and/or turn your host device into a proxy for other users/services.