Not great with tech so please pardon my ignorance. For standard browsing such as reddit/socials, shopping etc, is there anythinfg wrong with selecting your own countrys VPN? I’ve been trying to access LinkedIn when I’m connected to another country it doesnt seem to like it and shows a black and white linkedin logo and nothing else, but when I select my home country its fine and I’m sure this isn’t the only site with these issues.
I just wonder if you are based in USA, UK, Australia is there anything wrong with selecting that same country? Is there a risk of being tracked if you do?
As /u/1401_autocoder stated, VPN’s don’t prevent tracking.
VPN’s prevent your others on your network and your Internet provider from monitoring, redirecting or censoring where you go on the Internet, and provide some protection against man-in-the-middle (MItM) attacks (at least on the connection between you and the VPN server). You can still be tracked via cookies, web bugs, advertising ID, device ID, logon account, and several other techniques.
A VPN is only a part of a privacy seeking effort to minimize one’s digital exhaust in this surveillance economy.
A privacy respecting browser and non-google/Bing search engine, email aliases, credit freezes and data sharing opt-out requests are also important.
What’s in your threat model?
Abusive ex?
Paparazzi?
Crazy uncle?
Big tech?
Da law?
It’s a balance between security, privacy, and anonymity versus convenience, cost and effort.
When you use your internet connection, there is a stream of data. Your ISP would be able to “graph” this. Even tho the content would be unreadable when using VPN, the server that is used is defined in that stream in readable format.
When you’re using a VPN, that graph has a twin somewhere else on the planet. This is at the VPN-server.
The VPN server is used by many more users. But, in theory, somebody like a government or backbone-ISP -may- do some fourier wave-magic and match.
The government knows /has ability to know it everytime you’re using a VPN and which server your are connecting to. So in theory, the ISP’s or the products they use (routers/switches etc.) would also reveal this if information is exchanged between VPN endpoint and your ISP (or the products they use).
Thanks all, this is really helpful. So I should be good to use my home country? I guess so unless I want to watch like Netflix from another country etc.