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Using VPNs for "privacy" on forums, and forum spammers

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peter-h:
Very true for wifi hotspots. I use a VPN for same reason there.

DiTBho:
When you enter in a shop to buy some bread, do you wear a balaclava? When you go to a pharmacy shop do you wear something that covers the entire head and neck and like a visor it only leaves the eyes out?

So why do you want to hide your identity over the internet? They call it "privacy", but it's ridiculous and paranoid at the same time.


--- Quote ---Traditional Breakfast, $2.99. ...
Swedish meatballs, $6.99. ...
Pork Shoulder, $9.99. ...
TIE: Hot Dog, $0.75, or Cheese Pizza Slice, $2. ...
Swedish Gravadlax, $5.99. ...
Chocolate caramel cake, $2.99. ...
Salmon with Wheat Pilaf, $8.99. ...
Frozen Yogurt, $1. ...

--- End quote ---

Ikea isn’t just for cheap bookcases. Almost inevitably, shoppers will end up eating at one of the Swedish retail giant’s in-store restaurants. They also offer free internet, so you can browse the public web having some of these delicious. Nothing wrong, but in this case, if you need to expose your password to a website, a VPN is a must.

It makes sense!

Protecting your identity is ok for home banking, it's ok if you really want to do home banking while you are checking the top 10 ranking of things to eat at Ikea, but ... Jesus, if you are visiting a forum, or a blog, well ... I'm like a candy seller in a little fort: I want to see you in face at the check-in before letting you in!

It's my house, it's my space, there is nothing to hide, you are my guest, and if you are a spammer, a bot, a nasty person, sorry, but ... there is no party for you.

That's it!

peter-h:
"if you need to expose your password to a website, a VPN is a must."

That's true, except that bloody google is de-ranking non-HTTPS sites so everybody has to go HTTPS if they want SEO. And eventually browsers will start blocking HTTP sites... which is a hassle for anybody running a hobby site because they have to organise a certificate and most of them aren't free. I moved a couple of little sites behind Cloudflare, not because they needed caching or DDOS protection but to get HTTPS for free. The many old sites out there which carry valuable content but aren't maintained anymore will have problems...

So nobody can see the passwords.

POP3 email and FTP is different and they need a VPN. But few people use these today.

I also use a VPN (terminated at my house) when accessing my bank website - because the stupid people are blocking non-UK IPs  |O

But for a forum? No. Not even if it was HTTP, and of course the pwd is used only for that forum ;)

PlainName:

--- Quote ---When you enter in a shop to buy some bread, do you wear a balaclava?
--- End quote ---

No, but I wear a mask now  :-DD

It's a different situation. The shop doesn't know where you've come from or are going to, what you've bought elsewhere or how much money you have. The tracking website, OTOH...

The problem is not so much that your data is visible but that it's easily collatable. If any data lookup involved a bloke leafing through many volumes of books, it would hardly matter. Isolated data, which is effectively what that would be, is fairly meaningless, but when computers get involved each datapoint isn't isolated but is immediately referenced to all other points. As three-letter agencies will tell you, the contents of your phone calls (what you said) is not as important or useful as the metadata (who you called, when, from where, for how long). It's the metadata (how much money you have, what do you spend it on, where do you spend it) that shops would love, not what your face looks like.

An alternative way of looking at it: suppose you go into a shop and someone is looking at you. Not a big problem. Now suppose you got to another shop and notice the same person looking at you. Not only that but you discover that this person is actually following you, making notes in a notebook whenever you buy or even just look at something. They are waiting for you when you leave your house in the morning and follow you, a few steps behind, everywhere during the day, always making little notes in the book, perhaps taking a photo of you now and then. Are you seriously suggesting that you would be OK with that?

PlainName:

--- Quote ---but ... Jesus, if you are visiting a forum, or a blog, well ...
--- End quote ---

I was going to post a link to some research, but I don't  have time to find it at the moment. However....

Remember Cambridge Analytica? During that fracas an appropriate data engineer was interviewed and it was shown how apparently innocuous data about you could indicate who you would vote for, for instance. It was also shown that during the Brexit election, specific groups (found using that kind of inference) were targetted for specific ads on Facebook, and those ads influenced those groups enough to swing their votes.

Remember the Capitol riots? There you have another example of people being targetted so they could be fed bullshit to achieve some end.

There are also many examples of people's Google searches, Amazon purchases, Facebook posts, etc being quoted in court to show that they are clearly terrorists or drug runners, even though when placed in less emotional contexts it obviously wasn't. Fit-ups like that wouldn't be possible if someone hadn't already grabbed that data.

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