Assuming I use a browser that I’m not logged into?
VPNs won’t give you anonymity. If you’re what doing calls for true full anonymity, then use Tor.
With that said, if you just want good privacy, that’s where VPNs are good. I personally wouldn’t use or recommend NordVPN, as imo they’re kind of dodgy as their clients are proprietary, they’ve been hacked before, etc. I just don’t really see a reason to use them when there are better and more trusted options. I’d personally recommend Mullvad, ProtonVPN, or IVPN.
I feel like this has to be said because a lot of people are under the impression that a VPN is going to give you anonymity. It doesn’t.
A VPN will allow you to obfuscate your location for geo restrictions. The majority of VPNs require you to use a credit card. That credit card is tracked form of payment. There is no law enforcement on this fucking planet that cannot find out who you are If you attach your credit card to a VPN.
There are small number of VPNs that use gift cards to bypass this. Nord VPN and all the ones offered on YouTube are not one of those.
If you want some privacy and anonymity get yourself an open WRT router. Enable ad block and use DNS over HTTPS proxy. That’ll at least keep the advertisers off your ass.
I can’t vouch for VPNs because I’ve never used one. But when I used to go to dodgy web sites, I would spin up a VM running Knoppix with no attached hard drive. It was still my IP address, but with a very different browser fingerprint and no cookies. Knoppix also has a Tor client included, although if you’re serious about privacy you’re probably better off using Tails.
VPN provides online anonymity just on the mediocre level it costs. Mostly used for pirating copyright content so people don’t end up like this guy.
If you are doing something that needs even more privacy. You can set up your own proxy such as buy VPS from providers. In this way you can layer multiple IPs to go though. Nobody is going to ask for many companies one by one around the globe to find you.
Bottom line is no. Also depends on the threat you are protecting against There are to many side attacks especially if you are talking state actors. VPNs are good for privacy and protection but I wouldn’t say anonymity.
You want anonymity use tails, whonix or tor
Vpn would give you anonymity to anyone outside of the vpn provider though.
So what you’re saying is if the creator of silk road had used the onion server option in his NordVPN client he never would have been caught? That sentence is slightly a joke - I know he was caught because he made a fingerprinted post with his original Gmail address in a forum that gave law enforcement a lead.
I was never asking about 100% anonymity. Just “pretty good” as per the post. As in, the only one who could see what you were doing would be the VPN provider.
There are small number of VPNs that use gift cards to bypass this. Nord VPN and all the ones offered on YouTube are not one of those.
I literally bought my nordvpn with a giftcard…
Never asked about 100%
Thats why I said “pretty good”.
Thanks I’ll check out Tails, sounds interesting. Why not just use a clean browser without any logged in services in the browser?
Why not? Using a clean browser, and vpn should be fairly anon.
i think nordvpn bad for privacy. all traffic is routed through their servers. i did a bit of digging and noticed strange wifi proxy port opened up when enabling nordvpn threat protection. under my wifi > proxies, two strange ports gets enabled which seems to route all my traffic to 127.0.0.1:XXXXX and 127.0.0.1:XXXXX respectively for web proxy and secure web proxy. dug a bit further and every time i navigate to a site a new port opens up and routes the traffic to those two ports above. the original process seems to be owned by com.nordv
Not really, there are many ways of tracking you, such as device fingerprinting. Unless you’re using something like Tails, and if you log-in to something like Facebook or Gmail then they’ll have no problems knowing exactly who you are.
Supercookies and browser fingerprinting. Although if you only use the browser for one purpose, that severely limits the data trackers can gather.
I don’t know how paranoid you are about being tracked online. A clean browser is certainly more convenient than Tails, and you can get pretty good tracking protection with privacy extensions. It’s ultimately up to you.
Thats why I said in the post, if I were not using a logged-in browser.
In firefox, turn on “always open in private window” and just use firefox as your container. Install it using flatpak though.
Or just docker container works too but the firefox method is good.
You don’t need to be logged in to be fingerprinted based on your device and browser.