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Is My ISP Able To Keep A Track Of My Internet Activities While I Use A VPN? - Computers - Nairaland

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Is My ISP Able To Keep A Track Of My Internet Activities While I Use A VPN? by Osoca(m): 11:42pm On Mar 30, 2016
Well, the generic answer would be "No." Your ISP wont be able to track down your internet activities while using tor or VPN.

PRIVACY WITH TOR
Now as far as Tor is concerned, they actually intend to provide you full privacy and are more trustworthy than VPN providers, however their implementation is not as firm ad premium VPNs. There have been cases of loopholes with Tor systems, and mostly they anonymize your browsing activity only and not what you do with your other apps which use internet. For e.g. refer this story:
FBI hackers took down a child porn ring

As tor use proxy settings, the ip assigned by tor are flagged as proxified, which means that even though your ISP may not know what you are browsing and also may not know that you are using a proxy or tor, but the websites(some)you visit (like Netflix, whoer etc ) would come to know that you are using some proxy service(not always, but they regularly update their lists), though it would not reveal your idendity, but as tor are frequently subjected to attacks, in some cases your real IP is revealed. Else it is safe.
Speeds with tor are very very slow.

PRIVACY WITH VPNs
As far as VPNs are concerned, they are technically more trustworthy than tor, but privacy wise, they may not be, depending on which country they are bases upon. As far as technical infrastructure of VPN providers are concerned, they are can be far more trustworthy than tor. But the only issue is "your trust on the VPN which claims no logs bein maintained by them, can't be guaranted". For e.g. :
“No logs” EarthVPN user arrested after police finds logs

Now in USA, almost all VPN providers are bound by their strict jurisdiction of data retention(maintaining logs, which has your originak IP at the time of logging in to the VPN) and the same has been the sutuation in EU. However some Americans claim that they use PIA VPN and find it quite trustworthy as they no longer recieve DMCA or MPAA or other copyright notices frim competitive courts. Hence the number of trustworthy VPNs is decreasing year by year. They keep on changing their Privacy Policies and Terms and Conditions almost evey year or two, and in some cases even privacy concerned VPNs are forced to comply with their country's jurisdiction. If not, then they might have to change their headquarters to a different country over a night or so, or close/terminate/suspend the company, or pay a heavy price like serving a sentence or paying a hefty sum as fine. For that reason follow the ongoing "Apple vs US+FBI battle/case". If Apple.Inc wins the case, it could provide support to the VPN companies too so that once approved by the govt, the govt can't force to change their Privacy Policy, neither by thenselves(mostly not) nor by the govt. Any changes in policies should be reflected in an agreement duly signed by both the parties(company and govt).

As far as security is concerned for VPNs, they depend on which protocol you use while connecting to VPN. PPTP and L2TP protocols are currently easily decrypted by NSA. SSTP and IKE2V are secured too, currently not crackable by NSA, but however as the infrastructure is not open source and owned and developed by private giants like Microsoft and Cisco, we can't trust them either. And Microsoft has been popularly known to actively spy on users with their new spyware OS called " Windows 10". So they are out of trust. OpenVPN is the only protocol that can be trusted. However in addition, user should also keep a check on DNS leaks. Sometimes, it is better to change DNS to public DNS. Even most VPNs too use public DNS, while some VPN use private DNS too. Speeds with VPNs are better than tor, but can be slow at times. It depends on server to server and your current ISP bandwidth too.

Now one more thing which 95℅ VPN users dont do to anonymize completely is change their system time and time zone, which adds to the suspicion that the user might be behind a vpn(but just might be).

You can get the list of secured vpn services from www.downloadvpn.org
Re: Is My ISP Able To Keep A Track Of My Internet Activities While I Use A VPN? by persius555(m): 2:14pm On Mar 31, 2016
Nice info. All the ISP sees in its routing table is your assigned IP address. The contents of your payload is somwhat hidden to them. End user based vpns are reliable if security parameters can be manually configured. A question. Are vpn traffics visible to web admins? If they are not, how does the router on the website end determine where to direct the traffic if informations like IP header, ports, session tokens are hidden. I have a fair idea of how the network based vpn works, but this one is not clear.

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