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My thoughts about using a VPN during everyday life

Roelof Jan Elsinga on September 11, 2019

My thoughts about using a VPN during everyday life For the past month, I've been using a VPN for all of my internet usage, including m...
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FieldMarshallVague

It's vital to remember that a VPN only protects you against IP-tracking. There are other types of tracking. The most common one is cookie-trackers. Websites you visit store a cookie on your machine (or lets a 3rd party), with a unique ID on it. On another site, a background request to the first site (an image, for example) accesses that cookie and finds that unique ID again, identifying you.

Any partners who share this data can easily identify you this way. Which is why GDPR is great, but fairly easy to circumvent, if they are evil or if you are careless -easily done, since it's REALLY tiresome to go through ALLLLL those options every time they 'forget' you said "you can remember my choice with a 'local-storage only' cookie".

So, make sure you do not allow '3rd party cookies' (e.g. using BRAVE browser). Otherwise all those site you DO allow to set cookies may eventually be the ones holding the gates open for all the other snoopers.

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

Very good point! I've been using Brave on my laptop for a while and it's been a nice experience.

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Ryan Peacan

I've been experimenting with using a VPN consistently on my work computer and my phone recently. I use PrivateVPN, the purchase was originally just motivated because it works well for Netflix and Hulu. I'm not sure if it's actually that great of a VPN as far as security goes, to be honest.

Anyways, I wanted to see how realistic using it 24/7 would be, and on my phone. I'm living outside of the United States, and there are a few work apps and Google Voice that I wanted to use on my phone that require being in the US, so I set it for NYC.

Overall I didn't notice much difference overall, except for being less targeted by ads.

I did notice this would cause issues on my phone when I tried to use some location-based apps, such as a local bicycle rental app here in Mexico. Maybe I'm dumb, but I didn't think it would be affected since it should be using GPS locations for the app, but I would get odd errors and the service wouldn't work if I didn't turn the VPN off.

So yeah, overall it's been pretty smooth but I've had to do some switching back and forth on my phone unfortunately, which I don't love.

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

That's pretty similar to my experience actually. Most things still work the same, I just seem to be from a different place. I did have some trouble updating my apps in the play store a few times, but with the Android 10 update that seems to be fixed. Overall I've been very happy with how smooth everything is going. I using NordVPN, which is rated highly, but I don't think it should make much of a difference in most situations.

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Glenn Carremans

I have been using a VPN for my work laptop and mobile phone for about 6 months, mainly because the clients office I worked at has a very strict firewall that blocked a lot of the websites I use.
I also use it 24/7, even when I am on my home WiFi. Having an extra protection layer to your communication and be able to be sure that nobody can follow the websites that you are visiting in this data hungry time gives me an extra peace of mind.

I have also switched my default DNS and my VPN DNS to 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare DNS). They don't log any IP's.
For my VPN I use Private Internet Access, they also don't keep any traffic logs and this has been proven in court multiple times.

For a few months now I have also switched to Brave browser and DuckDuckGo as my default search engine on both devices.

I know that these steps alone won't help because I still use Google products and Facebook apps but still I think it is getting me in the right direction and minimises the amount of data that I share.

The only downside that I have experienced so far is that I sometimes get a recaptcha on certain websites. Not very often though but certainly a lot more than without a VPN.

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Roelof Jan Elsinga

You're going through all of the steps to online freedom, I love it! You're much further ahead with this than me. I have only experienced the recaptcha when browsing the internet through the Tor network. With NordVPN I haven't experienced this so far.