The most common argument used in defense of mass surveillance is ‘If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear’. Try saying that to women in the US states where abortion has suddenly become illegal. Say it to investigative journalists in authoritarian countries. Saying ‘I have nothing to hide’ means you stop caring about anyone fighting for their freedom. And one day, you might be one of them.
I’ve got a bit of a VPN question if anyone wants to educate a newbie a little. When I tried a VPN (Mullvad actually!) it defaulted to Sweden but then accessing my banking information didn’t work. If I switch a VPN to reflect that I’m somewhere randomly in the USA, is that still sufficient protection?
it depends™
what are you protecting yourself against?
for my use case, that’d be good enough, i don’t want my school/building admins to snoop on the websites i visit, and don’t want to fear academic repercussions for torrenting and such
though if you think your government is out to get you, then tunneling to another country is probably best!
Nothing that serious, thankfully. Just want to obfuscate my data and leave as little of an impression on the internet as I can. Good advice, thank you!
Your bank probably wants to make sure your account isn’t being hacked. Either they think you’re using a VPN, and they believe it could be a malicious person from literally anywhere, or they think you’re in Sweden, and they have no idea how you got there.
It’s cases like these where you might want to temporarily disable the VPN or make a special exception for your banking app, but that’s up to you.
Yep! That’s what I figured. I don’t mind. I appreciate the attention to security.
I’ve torrented in the US and haven’t been hit with anything. So I think it should be fine as long as you vpn anywhere. Except maybe very totalitarian countries.