Considering my threat model is just preventing my ISP to know which websites I am visiting and to prevent my government (India) from tracking me, do I need to use a VPN?
Currently, I am using a trusted VPN provider with a permanent kill switch and am never off of the VPN. Today, I was reading IVPN’s homepage and it says, “A VPN can be effective at encrypting your DNS requests so your ISP or mobile network provider cannot monitor or log the domains you visit.” But as far as I know, DNS over HTTPS does encrypt the DNS requests. Right?
I regularly clean my cookies, use hardened browsers, etc. So is a VPN really necessary for me? Or shall I just shift to using Quad9’s DoH or something?
Edit - I am using the router provided by the ISP and I cannot change it because I am behind CGNAT. I can use a separate device and install PfSense or OpenWRT or something on it and use that as a firewall. Any suggestions there?
Encrypted DNS is better than nothing but in terms of privacy it doesn’t help much.
TL;DR If you don’t want your ISP to know the sites you visit you need some sort of proxy (which can be accomplished with a VPN).
There is lots of metadata about your requests. With a proxy your ISP can only see traffic volume. The contents are encrypted and all go to the same IP address. With just volume information it is quite difficult (but not impossible) to determine what sites you are visiting.
Without any sort of proxy the ISP can see a wide variety of additional info:
- Which addresses you are connecting to. Can narrow down (and frequently pinpoint) what sites you are visiting.
- Domain of most sites you visit (via SNI) (for sites not using encrypted SNI which is most of them).
- Full info about unencrypted connections (consider turning on HTTPS only mode in your browser to avoid this).
- DNS queries if you aren’t using DoH, DoT or similar.
It sounds like you are aware but please remember that while this will be hidden from your ISP it will not be hidden from your VPN provider. You are essentially just shifting trust. Another advantage can be frequently changing your IP to make it harder for websites to track you. If you want to hide from everyone you will need a better solution such as Tor.
What was all the hub-bub years ago about proxies? Didn’t they do what VPNs do today? How are they different?
Just to add a counterpoint to all the comments, my personal policy is who do you trust more your ISP or your VPN provider, most VPNs say they don’t track but they can easily lie about it and they could easily change their policy overnight. Also, since most require a client installed on your machine, they could easily install a shim and get access to your in-flight encrypted data. If this were a case where you’re in a country where you know they’re tracking you, absolutely use a VPN that you trust. In the US/EU I just don’t see much use for a VPN unless you’re trying to get access to Geo-blocked content.
With some VPN services you may or may not help out in a peripheral way. I’ve seen a bunch of random times over the last year when websites prompt me about being in Ukraine. I’m in the USA. I switch my VPN location at random after clearing my cookies/cache/site settings. It seems to help obfuscate tracking to some degree. I really want to setup a automated randomized VPN on my next router running OpenWRT.
How do you access banking apps/websites with always-on VPN and permanent kill switch?
My banking apps and netbanking work just fine regardless of which country I am connected to. UPI (unified payments interface) requires an Indian IP, though. But I can still do everything while connected to my VPN provider.
None of my banking apps work with VPN even with a spoofed Indian IP. UPI works without issue for me as well.
The good one like Mullvad does not have a server in India. Do you recommend something as good as Mullvad for accessing UPI and strem vid apps?
Not OP, but back when I used Surfshark it had the ability to allow bypassing the VPN only for certain programs, IPs or URLs.
I mostly used it to get less latency with online games or getting access to them in the first place as often I’d encounter login servers that just didn’t work though a VPN.
