Privacy

32045 readers

1010 users here now

A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

Related communities

Chat rooms

[Matrix/Element]Dead
Discord

much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Does VPNs even work against Big Brother apps? Using one really protects our privacy? (masking our location) (lemmy.world)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I am currently using Proton VPN (free tier) which is set to Always-ON and Block Connections on disable.

Today while I am going through my Gmail security option, on the devices/sessions I found my real location mentioned over there. Even when I use desktop I always connect to VPN.

On this issue I got couple of doubts:

Is this because I am using a free tier VPN? so it's not functioning properly etc...
Else google fixed my location based on my previous location history? I used my google applications without VPN for many years, I am just learning & following privacy tips recently.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I see comments like this a lot, but they seldom say how it actually does work. How does it work?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

It's all dependent on what you're doing and how. Like if you use Facebook you're fingerprinted to the tits.

The granularity depends on examples like that.

But something a bit more benign and not as granular would be finger printing you based on the timezone your browser offers up. It's not as basic as like "-7 GMT" since the iso list can go down to the state and or country. So if in your OS you picked "America/Houston" a lot of browsers will pony that up without hesitation.

How many more bits of data until you know what city I'm in, Street I'm on. Etc. And there's tons of ways to derive that data over time.

https://browserleaks.com/ is an interesting example that can show all the bits of data your browser can give up.

And of course you can lock lots down given the right tools.