this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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If so, can you explain the value aside from changing location for streaming?

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[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 52 points 1 day ago (2 children)

While your ISP can't see everything, they can see metadata. They can see which websites you go to, which social media you use the most, where you bank, where you shop, etc. How much do you think it would take for your ISP to sell that data? If you happen to live somewhere there are laws againat that, you are slightly less at risk. Fines are only a deterrant if they're more than what's being offered for your data.

That being said, this only protects you against your ISP or other purely ipaddress based info gatherers. Apps/social media/websites don't purely use ipaddresses to track you.

[–] kaida@feddit.org 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Sorry, I still don‘t quite understand. So if I don‘t trust my ISP, why should I trust a VPN provider? Doesn‘t the vpn provider get the same metadata?

[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 1 points 23 hours ago

I'm not saying you should trust every VPN provider. Some have shown to be nore trustworthy than others. Police have raided their datacenrers and not gotten anything (no logs). And they have gone to courts and said they don't keep that info. However if you don't trust your ISP, and purely use a VPN, the only info your ISP will get is that you use a VPN. Your encrypted bank packet that they saw before is now an encrypted vpn packet. The vpn will see the encrypted bank packet, but youmre right, you have to trust that they have more to gain by not looking and selling than they gain by selling your info and losing customers.

[–] thermal_shock@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure this just encrypts your dns requests. After DNS resolution, the traffic packet headers still have destination/source ip addresses and they can reverse dns lookup the ip addresses. Might make it require a few extra steps, but they're the ones routing the traffic. Even your VPN traffic, they can't decrypt what's inside the packets, but they can see your traffic going to a known Mullvad vpn address in Norway or whatever.