Is it safe to use a VPN in a wired apartment connection?

VPN
1

I have stuff that I want to save, but I’m really paranoid about privacy and data security, especially given that I’m not used to living in an apartment. I really don’t have any idea of what kind of practical and legal boundaries there are in this kind of living situation, and in fact the lease agreement warns about having no expectations of online privacy.

I’ve already got an adapter so I can directly plug the router into my computer (i.e. not have to use the wifi), but then again I wonder if that actually makes a difference, since I’m still ultimately on the landlord’s system.

Same goes for a VPN. Everyone has heard about how great they are, but I don’t understand how they would work in a situation where you’re basically in someone else’s building. I mean, I don’t care how many “proxy servers” it goes through: at the end of the day the data has to go through the cables in the apartment.

I’ve heard that with a VPN landlords can see how much bandwidth you’re using but not what you’re doing, but that just makes it seem like a VPN would make them stand out more, like going into a public place with one of those Squid Game masks: sure, technically nobody can recognize you, but objectively speaking you’re drawing more attention than you otherwise would.

More generally speaking, how often do issues come up for datahoarders who live in apartments? I.e. bandwidth issues, getting wifi or IP banned due to landlord rules, etc.

2

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3

You are way overthinking this. Most landlords just bring in service to the building and often do not have any extra ability to spy on you. Let’s just say for arguments sake you had a landlord that was nosy and technical enough to act on it.

If you are using bandwidth you are using bandwidth, does it matter if it’s on or off a VPN? Not sure how that matters. If they have a cap you hit it anyway.

If you are that worried then use a VPN, that way all they could see is your endpoint. But then what if your VPN provider is flaky and spying on you for the Krytrons?

4

VPNs employ strong encryption. So all data passing between your PC and the VPN server is scrambled - as far as your landlord is concerned you are sending and receiving a wholeeee lot of data which is indistinguishable from random noise. In this set up the ability to spy on you transfers form your landlord or ISP to your VPN provider.

Most decent privacy focused VPNs have a “no log” policy meaning they don’t log user history. I wouldn’t rely on that policy to stop the police looking into you if you’re doing something illegal or anything, but for general privacy it’s quite sufficient. VPNs also have the benefit of assigning a shared IP meaning hundreds of people share the same IP address. This is advantageous because it makes it harder to prove YOU did something vs one of the other 50 people sharing the IP if things ever go tits up.

Holler if you have any questions re. how it works.

5

Is getting your own internet connection not an option? Being on a shared connection can be a bigger issue if it’s not configured properly.

6

Unless your internet plan is in your landlords name. Those wires your hooked up to belong to the ISP. Only them and whomevers name is on the account has access to those records

7
  • sigh *

Yet another person who has been bamboozled by the VPN providers. I wrote an entire series on who’s able to see what in terms of your privacy.

TL;DR - if you use DoT or DoH and TLS 1.3 you are just as protected as if you were running your own VPN. DoT/DoH are widely available today; TLS 1.3 is not as common but expanding rapidly. At this point in time roughly half of the web sites surveyed support it.

8

At best someone who is looking at it real hard will probably figure out you’re running some sort of SSH tunnel or VPN or something along those lines.
Simply because there’s not much else that looks like a random stream of data.

That said, that’s all they will ever learn. When done right, these things don’t ‘leak’.

The person looking at it will be unable to tell what you’re doing, what sites you visit, etc.

If they ever ask, you’re VPNed in to work.

Not that you should ever have to explain your internet use to your landlord… I have to wonder, what makes you concerned about this?

9

If you trust the VPN company, then yes, it is safe to use it.

What it does is: The vpn client (it could be an app from the VPN vendor or the OS/browser own implementation) will scramble your request before it leaves your computer and then send it to the internet using your connection. If anyone is in the middle and sniffing your data, they will just read encrypted scrambled data. So they won’t be able to interpret it and discover what site you are trying to access.

Then the encrypted data your computer sent gets to the VPN server, which has a key to decrypt it. Their computers will be able to know what your request was. They will then request the data for the site you asked and receive its content for you (in an automated and private way). When they get the data (a webpage, video, image etc) they will scramble it and send it to you.

Again, anyone in the middle of this connection will get encrypted data, and they won’t be able to (easily) figure it out what you are receiving. Only after it gets to your computer that the client will decrypt it and serve the information to you. Anyone listening to your connection will just see scramble data going from your computer to the VPN IP, forth and back. But this is less common than you might think though.

One advice is to not go for free VPNs.

10

So, you should be fine with a VPN on your laptop/phone. Your landlord will only see that you’re talking to the VPN and nothing else. This isn’t bad and really, unless they’re super teksavvy, they’ll have no idea anyway.

WiFi vs Wired makes no difference.

You have a wire to their modem so this is what I would do. Buy your own router that has support for a VPN setup. Google around, lots of sites will suggest routers, some VPN providers will sell pre-configured routers too. They’re expensive and not really worth it. But, if you’re lazy and want to pay for convenience, have at it. No judgement here.

Once you have your own router, plug their cable into your WAN port. This will cause you to “double nat” but it will treat your landlord like the internet. The landlord will see one device connected (your router) when in reality you can have hundreds connected to your router. This by it self will not hide what you do on the internet, just give you your own network.

Then, setup and test that your VPN (on your router) is working by checking what your public IP is. If its different than when you connect to the landlord WiFi then the VPN is working.

With this setup, if your landlord is looking, they’ll see one device that only ever talks to one thing on the internet. In reality you’re doing whatever you want on all the devices you want.

Edit: if there’s lots of people sharing this internet then they can’t easily determine who is using all the bandwidth. Even if its one or two people, I wouldn’t be worried.

As for the VPN, unless your country has laws against it, you’re not going to get in trouble. Again, your landlord will have to be monitoring your traffic to see youre using a VPN. If that is the case and they are watching, I’d strongly recommend using a VPN ALL THE TIME. That’s fucking weird and not cool. Shit, I’d even suggest moving, what other weird shit are they doing?

11

You need w wirless Router that can establish a WifiAsWan connection. Meaning you use your landlords device connected with a WiFi connection to your device as a gateway(modem) to internet (wan). Everything that is attached to your device is part of a subnet that is not accessible from the network that your landlord has, but a connection from inside (your network) to the outside will work (usually router is configured to act like that, if not it needs to be configured this way, but every routed can be configured to act in this way…
Read this for informational purpose.
Edit: More to read

12

Generally it’s pretty safe nowadays to connect to random networks, mostly everything is encrypted AND there are checks for certificates. Of course if you don’t do something stupid, like connect an unpatched windows (or really any machine) or something with file sharing enabled (and set the network to private, if it goes to public the firewall will block the file sharing), take care when your bank or facebook https says the certificates are wrong and so on. Mostly everything is safe, including your post here.

The landlord cares about getting nasty letters from lawyers about sharing (=torrenting, normal downloads like sitegrabs, youtube-dl are fine) some movie or song or whatever. For this the VPN helps completely, just pick one that brags about no-logging, maybe after going through this. Note that there’s no guarantee they don’t log; actually if I’d be a three letter agency I’d try to run as many VPNs as possible and market them as private and everything. But for the purpose of “oh this IP did that” from some random Mickey Mouse underling they’re perfectly safe and thick skinned.

Other than that if you think there might be a problem with your traffic volume - is you wifi from the landlord using just a single shared password? You can just use a random MAC each time you connect, there are many ways to achieve this (if not in the end you can get some repeater or USB network card if absolutely your WiFi adapter can’t do that, but usually it’s possible, even enabled by default on many portables nowadays for privacy reasons).

13

I know a landlord near me that had the 1 buck deal ( you pay a simbolic dollar ( for us it’s euro) and you are the owner of a unsued or abandoned building property of the city that has some historical value, but the contract has some duties, in this example is to keep the look and feel of the building but the building has to be modified and renovated as a multiple appartements building for people in need)
His building when renovated had a special phone and internet wiring with a central point of connect were fiber from all isp comes and ISP fiber to ADSL modules are installed and each appartment has three inputs, two fibers and one Cat6a RJ45 (ADSL)
He also runs as his own ISP with ubiquity hardware, where a 5/1Mbit internet access is available out of the box in the rent.

This connexion can be upgraded (via an additional fee on the rent) and the actual contract that is signed by the tenants was for the internet part written by myself.

Some kind of loging is done (the standard stuf proposed by ubiquity) were we can for example forbid some things (example: we have a blocklist based on known ips and sites that do illegall things an malwares, but the landlord can (as said in the contract) share the logs with the police in case of illegal things done (like searching for how to make bombs or illegal download and sharing) or block additional IPs based on these logs
Other thing is that all connections passes via a Squid Proxy ( mainly for things like windows update stuff that saves bandwith on the main 10Gb/s fiber connexion (from a professional operator with the landlord signed a sub-ISP contract))