Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world or !askusa@discuss.online
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
There's value in real privacy friendly VPNs (think Mullvad), otherwise you just end up trusting some other, probably very shady actors with all your data instead.
Unless you need one for specific things like using free wifi safely, torrenting or getting around restrictions then there is not much benefit.
Most VPNs won't even work for daily browsing as far as I'm aware. You'll get hit with way more captchas and potentially just not be able to access certain sites because someone has either got the vpn providers ip banned temporarily on the site or the site bans IP addresses associated with servers.
Personally, for generic browsing, I'm not too concerned if my ISP can see the domain names I'm accessing. I, as you probably do, only use HTTPS everywhere so the domain name is the most they'll know, but you can do some work to try limiting exposure with DNS over HTTPS (DoH), etc if you want to.
There's also TLS 1.3 addition of ECH which further helps by hiding the hostname.
Of course your ISP will always know the IP address you send packets to, but that is an even smaller problem.
And my final note: just use one when you need to, I don't think it's necessary to have one on 24/7 at home like some people advise and NEVER use a free vpn or one of the more mainstream ones (mullvad is best, second choice is AirVPN).