Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Does self-hosted VPN make sense? (lemm.ee)

submitted 6 months ago by pound_heap@lemm.ee to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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Hey all,

I've been using a commercial VPN for years on my mobile devices and home PCs. Recently I've started to use Tailscale and realized I can easily create a self-hosted VPN on a cheap VPS with unlimited traffic.

But I'm not really sure if that's what I need. BTW, I'm not doing anything dangerous, no torrents, no illegal stuff, no journalism or whistleblowing, not even looking up abortion clinics. I just hate mass surveillance and I don't want to be constantly profiled.

Commercial VPN allows to "hide in a crowd" by sharing IP with thousands of other clients. But there are a few issues:

Often sites blacklist VPN IPs, so I can't get in or pass captcha
Performance is not very good
I have to trust VPN to not keep the logs and not sell data. I used Mullvad and they are considered reliable, but you never know until it's too late

With self-hosted VPN, I'm losing benefit of "hiding in crowd" as my VPN will be used only by me and maybe a couple of other people. My understanding is that my VPS outgoing traffic is from static server IP. So if I login to Facebook once, the address is associated with me. I'll also have to trust VPS provider to not analyze my traffic and sell it. On other hand, I'm still protected from my ISP spying, from exposing my real IP address to web sites, from dangers of public WiFi networks. And I might get better performance for about the same price.

What's your take on VPNs? Tell me if you are using self-hosted VPN and why.

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[–] SzethFriendOfNimi@lemmy.world 5 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Exactly. Even for mobile use besides accessing your home resources you can avoid your cellular provider monitoring/hijacking your traffic.

Of course self hosting means you’re still sending that info from your home network over your ISP.

So it’s a trade off there but depending on your ISP vs your cellular network makes sense.

[–] pound_heap@lemm.ee 4 points 6 months ago

This is a good point. Maybe setting up a VPN at home would the good option for when I'm on the go