Hey guys n gurls, I was wondering if it is smart to disable my VPN connection for casual browsing.

Reasons: when having VPN constantly running it may be possible to track me via browser fingerprinting.

Szenario: the connection coming from the VPN which hypothetically downloaded a torrent, tries to watch capitalist propaganda while living in China, etc.pp has this screen ratio, this locale, this addons etc. And (more important) the YouTube login cookie we know belongs to this physical person/telephone number etc.

So I am wondering if I should only use the VPN when “needing” it (read articles not available in country, Netflix, read information government doesn’t like, things like that.) Or if I’m missing something here and I could obscure my causal day to day browsing as well without decreasing the security of the VPN.

For reference, the VPN doesn’t log anything (for more than a day) to my knowledge

EDIT: From what I understand from the comments: switching the VPN has little to no impact on widely used tracking and if at all makes it easier to corelate data. People emphasize the general lack of full privacy if you are wanted by entities willing to spend enough resources. But for the general need of privacy in normal usecases it makes more sense to just leave the VPN running.

  • MagneticFusion@lemm.ee
    0·
    4 months ago

    I would just leave it running all the time as it does give a privacy boost by masking ur approximate location and not letting your ISP spy on you. If you are going to do things like torrenting or visiting websites the government won’t like, at LEAST use a different browser that is hardened (let’s say you use basic firefox for regular browsing, use Mullvad browser or something instead for that specific task), or just straight up use TOR if what you are trying to do won’t require that fast of internet speeds. If you are solely worried about the VPN IP address, you can just switch to a different server to a different country.