Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

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.

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Can a VPN read my traffic to know what I'm doing? (lemmy.autism.place)

submitted 1 month ago by ASDraptor@lemmy.autism.place to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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https://torrentfreak.com/italy-approves-piracy-shield-vpn-dns-proposal-risk-of-prison-for-isps-intact-241001/

As title. Italy is decided to pass a law that basically creates a chinese-type firewall in the country. The question is simple: even if I'm not doing anything illegal, my VPN provider will have to know what am I doing to report it in case it's illegal, or face jail.

So how could my traffic remain private in this scenario?

Can a VPN provider with no logs policy be held accountable of anything? Can it actually know what I'm doing?

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[–] fl42v@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 month ago

Depends on your definition of "what", and the server you're talking to, and what DNS you're using, and your VPN provider, and maybe the phase of the moon.

So, pretty much the best-case scenario is when the site works via https, and the server supports "encrypted client hello" (ech), and your browser has ech enabled. In this case your VPN provider can see that you've sent something to the IP (one IP can host multiple websites with different domains).

Https and no ech = can see IP, can see the domain.

Http = can see everything (thankfully, quite rare now).

Some VPN providers may as well use their own DNS, then they can see what domains you've talked to regardless of ech (afaik, since domain lookup should happen before client hello, since you're basically looking up whom to "greet")

Some providers are Facebook with fake mustache and will shamelessly try to mitm you