There are people who get VPNs because they hear that they prevent your ISP from snooping on youwhen 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.
To explain that a bit better, lots of schools and workplaces have a VPN for employees / students to log into the local network of the campus / workplace to allow them to access internal resources (databases and such) without having to expose those resources to the public internet. It’s a sort of security measure.
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.
To explain that a bit better, lots of schools and workplaces have a VPN for employees / students to log into the local network of the campus / workplace to allow them to access internal resources (databases and such) without having to expose those resources to the public internet. It’s a sort of security measure.