Bit of an uphill fight with captchas everywhere. Do people here conduct all online activity over VPN whenever possible? Only for the sensitive stuff? Or perhaps the inverse because the bank already knows you? Maybe when travelling or getting around region blocking? Something else?
The one provided by my work aside, I realized that I don’t have any consistent rules around using VPN. Except sometimes, you know, when downloading ISO’s for my favorite distos.
I would use VPN, but it makes my Bitcoin Node stop receiving incoming connections.
Constantly.
I never have. Don’t know how to do it (I know it’s not hard). The only use I occasionally have is blocked media, but I just don’t watch whatever it is. It’s not that important to me.
What’s important to me is blocking ads, which I do as much as possible. The way I see it, the main point of them tracking me is to serve me ads, so I break the chain at the ads.
If I want privacy, I use Tor. Everything else seems like spitting into the wind.
I also think, ad/trackerblocker, Portmaster and common sense in what you public on the web is mostly enough (How much claims of the lack of privacy I saw in Facebook through the years…)
At home never, only sometimes a proxy (CyberGhost extension, Chrome, Firefox) in case of country restrictions. In my phone no need, I don’t use public WiFi, it’s enough with InVizible Pro. Apart the Portmaster app on desktop (Windows, Linux)
mostly against geoblocking when I want to watch public TV channels from while I’m not in the “right” country, e.g. when I want to watch PBS outside of the US, Arte outside of Europe (even though I dont think they block anymore), FranceTV outside of France, Ray out of Italy, etc.
Sometimes also for blocked content, e.g. PirateBay in France or AnnaArchive in Belgium but typically for these public proxies are enough.
Ah I also use self-hosted VPN for my own self-hosted services when I’m on the move but it is typically very small traffic.
FWIW I’m not using a large commercial ISP, so trusting my ISP is a big part of my behavior.
In a way always.
Whole family is connected to home network and home network has filters and blockers in the outgoing router.
Additionally home security system doesn’t have to keep connections open outside or have ports forwarded.
Outgoing router however does not have VPN set, so home network IP is visible. This is to keep everything operational and CAPTHCA from annoying users.
98% of the time. I hate having to turn it off to look at my local grocery store’s website but I have done it before.
I use a VPN 99% of the time, i turn it off when i need to access archive.org, or watch something on the public braordcasters streaming platform
yeah sure the captchas are annoying but it’s not like websites load within 10 seconds anymore
I only wish protonVPN was a good as the one i used previously, but i cancelled it cause it had ties to israel
You might want to check into split tunneling.
Most of the time, but I would emphasize always in airports or public wifi
I have a VPN configured at the router. I use a PI-hole with a lot of restrictions and lists to run my own DNS and downstream DNS is Adgaurd. Several machines I let bypass the VPN umbrella and they have local clients they can switch on at will. I’d like to make a Linux firewall too but not with prices where they are now. These days you have to distrust everything.
General activity goes out the VPN always. My self hosted setup, lab stuff, and work stuff gets different connections out (logically, not physically).
I leave mine on almost all the time. If a website takes a little longer to load “Oh no” its a half second instead of milliseconds. it really doesn’t change my life much.
