I am surprised by the lack of question about VPN/SPN
VPNs do little for your privacy, unless there's specific reason to trust them over your isp
ISPs pass on your data to various authorities in quite a lot of countries. My own country (UK) has such a terrible privacy reputation I wouldn't be at all surprised to find ISP's hand over data for every request.
Yep, same here. Its almost trivial for ISPs to hand over data to the govt on any invented basis. They also do so to any business or company that asks for it, but they will charge them fees AKA selling data.
Worst part is there is no oversight, and there really is no segment of population that cares about privacy to raise this as an issue either.
How do UK based VPNs differ?
imo it's always better to trust a well reputable VPN over your ISP. I don't know of any ISP that can be trusted. By not using them you're essentially turning a "maybe private" into a "certainly not private".
There is no reason to trust your ISP.
ISP's in many countries happily share with government, they also sell your data to ad agencies.
VPN providers are just ISPs you can hire without a physical connection in most respects there.
Nice try, ISP!
Nice try, VPN!
Oh my sweet summer child
Thank you for this helpful comment providing insight into a complex topic
If you are trying to maintain privacy from the bad actors that most people should fear -- that is, advertisers and marketers --
VPNs are very effective because they increase the cost of that kind of datasurvillenace of you enough to make it not worth it. At least for now.
If you are trying to maintain privacy against state actors, especially to hide criminal activity, they will not be particularly effective. But are still better than the ISPs who likely don't even have a policy of vetting state requests before turning over info.
VPNs are very effective because they increase the cost of that kind of datasurvillenace of you enough to make it not worth it.
Not really, because you left out a huge asterisk. They are only effective after you have implemented a bunch of other methods to deal with cookies, tracking scripts, finger printing etc.
A vpn on it's own doesn't do shit if you don't auto wipe your cookies after every session for example. Which vpn marketing conveniently forgets to tell you
I have a friend who works for a German ISP.
He personally has set up a system which automatically provides all the data requested by the police, without checking whether the request is formal and valid.
I rather trust a VPN provider from a jurisdiction where logging any user data is not required by law. Or an SPN, where even if logging has to be enabled by law, it is technologically impossibe to extract a user's activity from the data.
So you have a specific reason to trust certian VPNs over your ISP. My point was just that VPNs aren't inherently better than ISPs
I see what you mean, but I think that point is pretty inherent.
Most if not all countries have similar laws related to getting user data from ISPs by making them log it for some time. And people can only use the ISPs from their country.
On the other hand no country can force their law on a VPN provider from a different jurisdiction, yet people worldwide can use those VPN providers.
Relevant topics also missing from the survey:
Is "favorite" the one you use or the one you know you should use?
I took it as “the one I currently use the most”
Btw for Linux there is Goldwarden, a custom GTK client for Bitwarden, written in Go.
What are the benefits of this over the 1st party application?
No electron I guess. It is web based, so you dont benefit from portals etc.
Proper desktop autotype for Linux and an SSH agent mode.
Woo Librewolf getting listed as an option :D
Almost all my others were "other"
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)