this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Privacy
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Couple of VPSes and domain names. Maybe 10 euro per month total. That's like 3 bottles of wine so not a cost I worry about.
What kind of privacy benefits does renting someone elses computer power have?
All of them?
Like what? It’s not like your are more anonymous for doing that, and you lose complete ownership.
Something that people do is self-host software that respects its user’s privacy more than services some company provides to you for a monthly subscription. For example, you could host your own music streaming software on a server that you rent instead of using Spotify.
But what privacy do you have if you host on someone elses computer? That is what I am asking because I see a lot of people doing VPS but I don’t understand why from a privacy perspective you would do that.
Oh, so you simply don't see any difference between VPS rented from a reputable company and just storing data in google's DB. Well, I assure you those are different. VPS provider does not scan all servers, extract all the certificates from them, setup a MITM to intercept decrypt and analyse the incoming traffick, scan all your DBs to extract your emails and than sell all this data to advertisers. But if you believe they do than yes, renting VPS offers no benefits.
I agree.
I feel like certain providers are better than others. It is worth investigating imo.
Some providers use in memory security devices so that if the device was stolen, it would be useless.
Some offer 100% in country services designed to meet in country security & privacy needs , albeit at a higher price.
All privacy and security is a risk / reward scenario. What is the risk of an event, what is the personal reward for mitigating that event, what is the cost to do so.
Personally, I think the most important thing to do is try, and not gatekeep.
A bad actor is a bad actor and no amount of privacy practice is going to stop them.
Also worth asking genuine questions as it’s not like Google is going to roll out step by step avoidance practices to escape the various metadata machines, both theirs and their competitors.
I like privacy based practices because it is form of self reliance, one that requires a community to succeed!
That’s a good question. The hope is that the VPS provider is not reading the disk or sniffing the network traffic and using that information for commercial gains. For example, I could try to find a trustworthy VPS provider with a clear privacy policy for my music streaming server. To the provider, all they ideally see are encrypted bytes over the wire (probably using Wireguard or HTTPS for example).
Spotify, on the other hand, rely on customer usage data for their business. They sell advertising and do things like suggestions based on listening history across many users.
There is no guarantee that using someone else’s computer is 100% private. But it is probably more private than Spotify in this music streaming example.
You're seriously asking what benefits hosting my own email and cloud has over using 'free' services like gmail? Not letting google scan my emails is not a benefit privacy wise?
No I am not, I am asking why you are hosting that on a rented VPS instead of your own server
Because it's easier, more practical and cheaper.
This is a dead end, I am asking you of privacy benefits of a VPS and you say ”all of them” but you give me none. What’s the point?
I think the answer you are looking for is less privacy oriented than OP understands it to be. The benefit of renting computational resources someplace outside your control is e.g. that it allows you to send mails to known providers which otherwise would refuse your mail if you would sent them originatig from a private IP address or e.g. having a always on cloud storage without running a computer in your basement 24/7 etc.
None? I explained that the benefit is I'm not using a 'free', public service that scans my data. If you didn't get this very simple, clearly stated benefit than yes, this is a dead end.
I get that, but that is not what I asked for. So yeah, dead end :P
I assume what you're getting at is that there has to be an element of trust in that the server being remote you can't be 100% sure it's untampered with?
Much the same rationale can be applied to VPN's, private email, private domain registration. At some point you have to do your research and decide if you trust the provider or not. There are providers out there that allow anonymous renting via Monero payments etc and also allow you to install OS's based on an image you control as oppose to the standard ones they offer. If you combine that with private domain registration and connecting whilst on a good VPN that's much more private than something like GMail.
And yes you could do all that from a home based server but then you're dependant on your ISP always being up etc.
Thank you, I appreciate your non-douchy response