[Samurai]

Originally Posted by Aravind_M92

I strongly believe data secrecy and privacy is not a key point in these VPNs.

I have no technical understanding of how a VPN works but as a commoner from outside this is my perspective.

Aren't these two statements contradictory?

Ok, I haven't used these paid VPN services, simply because I don't like to handout my credit card details to them. But I have personally setup corporate VPNs, both site-to-site and user based VPNs for employees and customers, using 2-3 different firewall products. So I have good understanding of the concept. I am not really a network engineer, but have worn that hat many times out of need.

Originally VPNs were used to create a secure tunnel between two office networks, or to securely connect an employee to the office network. However, the commercial VPN services do none of these things. Their purpose is as follows:

1) To hide where the subscriber is located. By using a US based VPN, you can act like an US based internet user while living in India. This will let you unlock location based services and content, which may be denied to you otherwise.
2) You can use it to hide from local cyber laws. For example, US residents who love to download movie torrents will use a VPN from another country where such downloading is not illegal.

That is it, that is the privacy you get. They just encrypt the connection between you and the VPN server which could be located somewhere else. If you use https/ssh/sftp, the VPN service cannot see your data, since it is end-to-end encrypted. They are no different than your ISP in that regard.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by dark.knight

Its more than ok for our elders to operate internet as long as they know what to do with it ... ... ...

Watch what you're saying about elders.

My elders invented the internet, and I'm nearly 70. Bill English, the guy who made the first mouse just died in his 90s. His colleague who first demonstrated the working concepts of windows (small w) and most of the other interface features we still use today, in 1968 was born in 1925. Good grief, he must have been working before I was even born, 27 years later!

Of course, there are tech-savy and non-tech-savy people in every generation. Teens are scarier than elders. Worst of all (at least, this was a joke when I was in the trade) is the young guy that just got some certificate with the word Microsoft on it

[dark.knight]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Of course, there are tech-savy and non-tech-savy people in every generation. Teens are scarier than elders. Worst of all (at least, this was a joke when I was in the trade) is the young guy that just got some certificate with the word Microsoft on it

I respect every previous generation more than my own I believe the post-independence era up until 90's was probably the greatest time in Indian context, simpler times yet at the dawn for the country for being able to find its own identity and place in the world, a little under 50 years or so. Now please don't berate me for insulting our former rulers, I meant it only in the sense that a national identity was re-born in that time.

And that context is key in my previous post, its country specific, all we "kids" so to speak, in India, generally teach our folks, most of whom are comfortable with Nokia-type mobile phones after graduating from landlines and cordless ones, how to handle a smartphone since the internet to start with, can seem very, very odd if one were to take everything as truth. The people in developed countries are much more comfortable with technology so that's less of a deal there.

Besides, I actually like if people know less about technology, there is a subtle brainwashing globally that knowledge of technology and being able to harness technology is a super-power, I think not. I think reading books is the best way to learn, we still pick up Readers Digest, Outlook, The Week etc, Readers Digest is still one awesome read and the charm of doing crossword puzzles and Sudoku can never be understood by most of the teens today. I'm myself distancing from technology more than ever since the lock-down (we don't use food delivery apps either), I guess I'm also an old soul in a young body.

[thehighwayman]

I personally gave up Facebook ( one of the biggest culprits when it comes to selling personal data)and its affiliated products. Frankly I don't miss it anymore.

[Hayek]

Frankly I find targeted digital advertising useful - would much rather see ads for things I value than for assorted junk I would never buy. What irritates me most is when HDFC Bank (for example) calls me to offer a personal loan of ₹ 1 lakh when they know I have ₹ 5 lakh in my savings account - would much rather have people use public information about me (and yes, everything you post on FB or Twitter or Team BHP is public) and use it to target relevant ads

[Thad E Ginathom]

That is a point of view, yes... If you have to put up with ads, get useful ones!

I just block the ads anyway. But just because I block them doesn't mean that they are not being sent and being tracked and targeted, it just means I don't see the result.

[Prowler]

Originally Posted by binand

All digital ads are bad. Begins with the extreme levels of segmentation/targeting they end up doing. I block ads with a vengeance.

Unfortunately it is not that simple. There is no free lunch. Many high quality content sites depend on ads to survive - including this forum. If you source information from the net, some one has to pay for the upkeep of the site. Company owned sites will give you biased information.
And frankly, more than 70 % of my impulse purchases online are triggered by ads.

[binand]

Originally Posted by Prowler

Unfortunately it is not that simple. There is no free lunch. Many high quality content sites depend on ads to survive - including this forum.

It *is* that simple. Your logic:

* High quality content needs money for upkeep.
* Ads are a way of raising money for upkeep.
* Therefore high quality content needs ads for upkeep.

is an example of Politician's Syllogism and is a logical fallacy. To disprove it we only need to show examples of content sites that survive and thrive without ads: Wikipedia, The Ken/Morning Context, Medium - of the top of my mind (not including Stack Exchange or Quora because ad revenue is part of their revenue models).

Originally Posted by Prowler

If you source information from the net, some one has to pay for the upkeep of the site.

Sure. And I'm quite happy to pay for information that is useful to me.

Anyway the larger issue with online ads is the invasive and pervasive tracking the ad networks do. Concepts like "remarketing", "custom audiences" etc. have made online life with ads a miserable cesspool existence. Add to that the faceless nature of online advertising (Typically: the publisher contracts with an ad network to sell impressions, who subscribe to an ad exchange to get ads to fill those impressions, whose other participants contract with other ad networks to source ads from media buyers who contract with advertisers who have products or services to promote. Altogether too many entities) - most people don't realise that by accepting online advertising they are allowing unknown people to run code on their computers.

And once you as a publisher goes down on an ad-supported path you need to push page views, reduce bounce rates etc. that involve other players in the ecosystem who have their own vested interests in tracking users (clickstream trackers, analytics providers, viral marketing connects, UX researchers...).

For example, loading team-bhp.com also loads scripts and stuff from 9-10 other domains. All of those people are attempting to track me. I totally refuse to be that target.

[manchandap]

Another interesting topic on TBHP.

My thoughts on this:

• Privacy is a myth: Privacy went out of the window decades back when we started using the so called 'dumb cell phones'. The Telecom provider knew where we are at any given point of time, courtesy the mobile tower logs. The internet and smart phones have taken that stuff to next level. However, it's only been few years that we have started realizing about lack of privacy.We let Google track our location because we want to use their Maps.
• VPN for privacy: a debatable topic. Because now instead of our ISP knowing about our online activity it's the VPN provider that knows it. A key thing is the policy of sharing and retaining of the logs by the VPN provider
• There is no free lunch: Let's accept this. We use YouTube for free videos, Free navigation from Google Maps, Free Whatsapp, Facebook, Insta and other social media sites/apps. Developing and maintaining these needs money and money has to come from somewhere. Either the user pays or the developer will find other mechanism to fund it.Some of the developers have found smart ways to funding.
• Right Balance: As the saying goes excess of everything is bad. So, there's a need to find balance between screen time and offline time. It's great to be connected with people and share information in a jiffy but again a balance has to be maintained
• Safe Browsing Practices: Awareness about perils of accessing internet and sharing information online is necessary. When my kids started using net and social media, I would guide about how to protect privacy like not sharing their real names, phones numbers, address or similar info with strangers or random sites/apps. Even if a particular site/app has no malicious intent about our information, still we don't know about it's capabilities to protect our data
• Read an interesting tit bit about TOR somewhere: Our ISP would know if we are using TOR. So, this would be a red flag if the someone (like law enforcement) is intrusive enough -- usage of TOR is equivalent to suspicious activity, person has to hide something.
• Never save username/passwords in browsers especially for sensitive sites like financial institutions.
• And regularly clear your browser's history and cookies. Some sites use long lived cookies to target ads and products.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by manchandap

VPN for privacy: a debatable topic. Because now instead of our ISP knowing about our online activity it's the VPN provider that knows it. A key thing is the policy of sharing and retaining of the logs by the VPN provider

Your content is encrypted. As has been mentioned several times, though, unless it is a private-both-ends VPN, in which case there is no third-party supplier, your content is back in the open internet cloud between your VPN end point and its final destination.

It all depends what privacy people want. Bluntly, yes, it depends on what they want to hide and from whom. Yes, careful attention should be paid to logging, and to the laws of the jurisdiction in which a VPN company operates which may require both the logging and the disclosure to authorities on demand.

Safe Browsing Practices: ... ... ...

Most of us are probably our own worst enemy, giving away our privacy.

Read an interesting tit bit about TOR somewhere: Our ISP would know if we are using TOR. So, this would be a red flag if the someone (like law enforcement) is intrusive enough -- usage of TOR is equivalent to suspicious activity, person has to hide something.

I have mentioned in the thread, having read it in the Tor documentation: Your ISP knows you are using TOR, the destination service is able to know. If anybody is watching us, they might indeed wonder what we want to hide!

By the way... Did you know that the biggest contributor to the TOR project is the USA Government?

[manchandap]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

By the way... Did you know that the biggest contributor to the TOR project is the USA Government?

Thanks for this piece of info. I was not aware of this.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Hope I'm right on that one. I guess what I read was this from Wikipedia:

The bulk of the funding for Tor's development has come from the federal government of the United States,[18] initially through the Office of Naval Research and DARPA.[19]

The alpha version of Tor, developed by Syverson and computer scientists Roger Dingledine and Nick Mathewson[18] and then called The Onion Routing project, or Tor project, launched on 20 September 2002.[1][26] The first public release occurred a year later.[27] On 13 August 2004, Syverson, Dingledine, and Mathewson presented "Tor: The Second-Generation Onion Router" at the 13th USENIX Security Symposium.[28] In 2004, the Naval Research Laboratory released the code for Tor under a free license, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) began funding Dingledine and Mathewson to continue its development.[18]

In December 2006, Dingledine, Mathewson, and five others founded The Tor Project, a Massachusetts-based 501(c)(3) research-education nonprofit organization responsible for maintaining Tor.[29] The EFF acted as The Tor Project's fiscal sponsor in its early years, and early financial supporters of The Tor Project included the U.S. International Broadcasting Bureau, Internews, Human Rights Watch, the University of Cambridge, Google, and Netherlands-based Stichting NLnet.[30][31][32][33][34]

From this period onward, the majority of funding sources came from the U.S. government.[18]

The whole story, on Wikipedia.

[Prowler]

Originally Posted by binand

To disprove it we only need to show examples of content sites that survive and thrive without ads: Wikipedia, The Ken/Morning Context, Medium - of the top of my mind (not including Stack Exchange or Quora because ad revenue is part of their revenue models).

I have been seeing bold messages asking for donations all over Wikipedia these days. So instead of ads, Wikipedia depends on charity and donations - not something you can always count on.
This forum uses Google Adsense to monetize and the publishers don't have to scout for potential advertisers on their own. They just leave that to Google who will sell the ad space, collect the money and share the money with the publishers. You know all this.

And I mentioned high quality content sites in my argument. Most of them run a limited number of ads in a given page. The run-of-the-mill , made for Adsense sites are the ones who plaster ads all over the page which anyway have little worthwhile content. Another highest number of ads per page sites belong to the media.
So you can't brush the entire ad scenario with your broad brush - so contemptuously. Until people are willing to pay for top quality content with top dollars, ads are probably the only way publishers can pay their bills.

By now you would have guessed that I have a personal agenda in defending ads. I am a publisher and I detest free lunches. So I block our content to people who block ads. At the least I don't have to pay for the wasteful bandwidth consumption.

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by Prowler

I have been seeing bold messages asking for donations all over Wikipedia these days. ...

Indeed. I would make a small donation, except they say they are required to have my PIN. This I am not prepared to give.

So, for the sake of small privacy issue, I will have to block the requests if they continue. I would have donated instead.

[shipnil]

For accessing Bank websites is there a difference between accessing through bank apps or through the browser, as far as privacy is concerned? I generally avoid installing multiple bank apps to save on phone space.