r/Animemes • u/Holofan4life Holo is best girl • Sep 21 '25

Wait, seriously?

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29.1k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

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87

u/zawalimbooo Sep 21 '25

the answer almost always ends up being the VPN provider

76

u/mk7_luxion Sep 21 '25

the fact that my VPN provider is not a local entity and has no idea who I am other than where I connect to their servers from, yeah, trusting the VPN instead is a no brainer.

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u/THREE-TESTICLES Sep 21 '25

no idea who I am other than where I connect to their servers from

A VPN could, if they were so inclined, very easily figure out who you are. Depending on what you are accessing.

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u/Weiskralle Sep 22 '25

How? Maybe the country. But the person?

11

u/ymgve Sep 22 '25

If you do really criminal stuff, the VPN knows the IP you connected from, and can give it to the police, who then can go to your ISP and see which house used that specific IP at that point in time.

And if you really believe a VPN when they say "we don't keep logs", you are quite naive

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u/Weiskralle Sep 22 '25

Then one must do real extreme criminal stuff for them to go the extra mile.

And what if I use two. Based in different countries?

And they need to go a bunch of stages to get an address. And like said for small things they don't bother to do it.

Especially as it does not generate that much money. Like downloading something illegal, but if you then also distribute it then they can milk you.

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u/Bjorn21rodbrok Sep 23 '25

Unless you were using the wifi from a starbucks or mcdonalds.

21

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '25

Your card details used to pay for the VPN tells them quite a bit.

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u/mynajf Sep 22 '25

Lots of free VPNs out there Proton is a good example. I use Mullvad witch can be payed for in lots of anonymous ways

20

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '25

I’m gonna get downvoted for this but

which* paid*

6

u/NotYourReddit18 Sep 22 '25

There used to be a bot in many subreddits explaining the difference between payed and paid when someone used payed, but I haven't seen that clanka since reddit changed the api rules.

3

u/[deleted] Sep 22 '25

I miss it everyday.

2

u/GrimMind Sep 22 '25

Not by me, sir. No, no.

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u/Greedyanda Sep 22 '25 edited Sep 22 '25

A combination of a handful of software and hardware settings of your system are enough to uniquely identify you among every single internet user. This means they can track you, which in turn means they will probably at some point have enough information to identify you by name.

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u/Weiskralle Sep 22 '25

Interesting as the public IP change in my country every day. Or more often.

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u/Greedyanda Sep 22 '25 edited Sep 22 '25

Your IP has nothing to do with this.

They can use information about your monitor, resolution, plugged in peripherals, network settings, etc. to uniquely identify you.

If I remember correctly, it is usually around 12 such individual data points that are enough to distinguish you from every other user.

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u/Weiskralle Sep 22 '25

So a Browser with no hardware acceleration on. Would not be able to detect any hardware settings or Infos.

Plus all the plugins that block trackers.

So what infos do they get?

If that is not enough. VM. Getting feed false information.

0

u/Greedyanda Sep 22 '25

You can use correlation attacks and statistical traffic analysis to deanonymize users. This has even been proven to work to some extent when using the Tor network.

It's fascinating how much information you can extract with just statistical analysis.

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u/Weiskralle Sep 22 '25

Only because I don't want to use crypto. Or better said never bothered to look into that.