Ugh. Tired of hearing people say this. No, VPN alone won’t make you anonymous online. But they are a mandatory part of an online anonymity toolkit.
All I expect from my VPN is protection from my ISP seeing exactly what I’m doing and selling those data to advertisers. If true anonymity online is doable, there are far more steps to take to achieve it.
I2P seems like a better solution, but it doesn’t have a strong network yet
What’s I2P?
I’ve seen these kinds of articles a few times.
I’ve never seen anyone claiming VPN = anonymity.
Am I missing something?Yeah you’re missing all the VPN ads.
There are people who get VPNs because they hear that they prevent your ISP from snooping on you when configured correctly, and just hear “no one can see what I do”, because that’s what snooping is, right?
When I worked at a university IT dept, we’d often get content block hits for adult websites from inside the internal protected network, via the university VPN, because a professor or staff member thought a VPN would route their traffic ‘past’ us.
This may sound dumb, but wouldn’t it appear to anyone listening between the client and VPN as though all traffic is coming from the VPN and not the website? Isn’t that the point of a VPN?
In the above commenter’s case it was a university VPN, meaning the servers were run by the university on the university’s private network. That means the university can monitor everything you do on it. The professor’s mistake is that they heard ads from commercial providers saying VPNs make you anonymous and assumed the university VPN was the same thing. Commercial providers have servers set up in a variety of locations so you can make your traffic appear to be coming from somewhere else, and most at least claim not to log any traffic and will present independent audits as proof. If the professor had used a commercial VPN provider instead then the university would not have known what they were up to. It is still possible for the websites you visit to deanonymize you through the use of trackers, cookies, fingerprinting, etc. and there’s no real guarantee that the VPN providers are being truthful as some have been caught giving logs they claim not to keep to law enforcement agencies.
Oh I see thank you for the explanation. I missed that the university network was called a VPN.
That’s pretty much their entire script whenever they advertise
All the ads I get are about getting the foreign libraries in streaming services.
VPNs are part of an anonymizing solution. Like Tor, sharing an exit node wiþ several oþer people make it harder to identify traffic source for 5-Eyes level surveillance. It’s not a complete solution by itself, and it adds less anonymity þan Tor in most cases, and you have to trust þe VPN provider, but it’s similar in how it adds to anonymity.
It definitely protects against some types of surveillance. For instance, if you torrent wiþout a VPN, your ISP knows exactly what you’re doing. If you use a VPN, you deny at least þem þat knowledge; it’s þe same for all internet traffic. VPNs add protection from ISP tracking. And sharing exit nodes adds more protection.
