“Will Your VPN Respect the Privacy Of My Upcoming Criminal Conspiracies?”

People want to conduct their daily affairs in private? Okay.

People want privacy regardless of potentially criminal conduct? Getting debatable.

People want privacy in order to plan specific future crimes? Crossing a line.

People want to force Internet privacy companies to protect them from specific law enforcement agencies while they openly solicit hitmen? Unacceptable.

And “People” means “Congressmen speaking on the record”? Clown World.

Lawmakers push FTC to clean up the VPN industry

h ttps://www.theverge.com/2022/7/17/23264384/lawmakers-ftc-eshoo-wyden-vpn-industry-roe-v-wade-abortion-privacy

By Emma Roth Jul 17, 2022, 2:37pm EDT

Such an innocent-sounding title.

Last week, Congresswoman Anna Eshoo (D-CA) and Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) wrote a letter urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to address deceptive practices in the Virtual Private Network (VPN) industry.

Yay!

Eshoo and Wyden’s letter comes as people look to hide their digital footprint following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Huh?!

A VPN allows a user to establish an encrypted connection between their device and a private server, making it harder for third parties to access their online activity. With abortion becoming illegal or restricted in several states, more people are looking to conceal their messages and search history, as police can use this information to prosecute someone seeking the procedure.

It’s one thing for a privacy company to conceal a member’s actions without checking whether it might include criminal conduct. It’s quite another thing for a company to conceal a member’s actions BECAUSE it includes criminal conduct.

In their letter, Eshoo and Wyden ask the FTC to clamp down on VPN providers that engage in deceptive advertising, or make false assertions about the range of their service’s privacy. The lawmakers cite research from Consumer Reports that indicate 75 percent of the most popular VPNs “misrepresented their products” or made misleading claims that could give “abortion-seekers a false sense of security.” Eshoo and Wyden also call attention to reports accusing various VPN services of misusing user data, as well as “a lack of practical tools or independent research to audit VPN providers’ security claims.”

VPN Security claims? Or VPN guarantees to interfere in police investigations? The rule of law means NOTHING to our leaders.

And their concerns aren’t even legitimate! Let’s follow that Consumer Reports link.

h ttps://www.consumerreports.org/vpn-services/should-you-use-a-vpn-a5562069524/

December 2021

For years, many security experts advised people to use virtual private networks, or VPNs, to help make their internet browsing more secure. [And] that’s still valid, at least to some extent. But as a tech journalist who’s been looking into VPNs since 2016, I’ve seen advice from security experts change over time. VPNs can be useful, but they’re not necessary for every person or every situation, especially now that so much web traffic is encrypted using HTTPS, the secure protocol whose initials you see at the start of most web addresses.

This article doesn’t claim that VPNs are untrustworthy. It claims that they’re often unnecessary.

Some people may want to use a VPN to try to hide their identity or location from websites they connect to. That’s because the technology will mask your IP address, but that isn’t as effective a step as it might seem. Although company websites do use IP addresses as an identifier, there are many other tools they use that a VPN will not protect you from.

Your location can be determined from your GPS, and gleaned from the name of the WiFi network you connect to. And you can be tracked through web cookies, tracking pixels, and digital fingerprinting, in which apps and websites triangulate characteristics of a computer or phone, such as operating systems and model names, and screen resolutions, to uniquely identify individual users.

“There’s a ton of metadata, there’s a ton of time correlation, and those are not just hypothetical issues,” says security researcher Kenneth White. “There’s a multi-multi-billion dollar identity monetization industry right now. There’s entire lines of business and startups and there’s a whole ecosystem and world around it.”

I don’t understand how my personal info can be so valuable that a major goal of Big Tech is defying my privacy countermeasures, but that doesn’t change the facts that 1. it is, and 2. they don’t want to be honest about it. Thus, the countermeasures will continue.

Meanwhile, I’m not seeing a reason why VPNs shouldn’t be trusted.

While using a VPN means all that information is hidden from your ISP, the VPN provider can see it all instead. And it’s extremely hard to judge how well any of the hundreds of VPNs on the market take care of your data…

Here, the lack of evidence is a good sign.

In Consumer Reports’ testing of VPNs running on Windows 10, Mullvad, IVPN, and Mozilla VPN stood out for their strong privacy and security protections.

Bullshit. I know little about the Internet world, but what I do know is that Microsoft and Mozilla are two of the least trustworthy tech companies on the planet. Windows 10 is a factory for surveillance & data mining. Don’t believe me? Read that EULA you “agreed to” when you installed it. “We care so much about your privacy and data that we update the contract twice a day without explanation or your consent. Also, we’ll update you computer at will with whatever we think it should be updated with. Hugs and Kisses, Killy Gates, and remember you did this to yourself.”

This article reads like a plant job. “You don’t need a VPN. You need to trust Microsoft and Google to have your best interests at heart. Big Brother loves you!”

[Microsoft et al.] all have consumer-friendly privacy policies, and marketing copy accurately represents their product and its underlying technology. In addition, their client-side code—the software that runs on your computer—is open-source, so it can be inspected by outside researchers like those at Consumer Reports. And these VPN providers subject themselves to independent third-party security audits and publish the results.

Why do I feel like this tech journo knows even less about tech than I do?

Anyway, two Swamp Creatures cited this article to complain that many VPNs don’t leave enough of a data trail for them to be sure that it’ll protect their privacy from law enforcement specifically when they disobey the law in order to kill their children. If only their privacy efforts were properly documented like Google’s and Microsoft’s!

End segue

“With abortion illegal or soon to be illegal in 13 states and severely restricted in many more, these abusive and exploitative data practices are simply unacceptable,” the letter reads. “We urge the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to take immediate action… to curtail abusive and deceptive data practices in companies providing VPN services to protect internet users seeking abortions.” Eshoo and Wyden also ask that the FTC develop a brochure that informs anyone seeking an abortion about online privacy, as well as outlines the risks and benefits of using a VPN.

That is not how Internet privacy works. You don’t announce your criminal intentions then demand all VPN companies become a knowing accessory before the fact.

And the Clown World of it all, is that giving these feminists what they demand would leave their privacy LESS protected than it currently is.

…Google [promised] to auto-delete location data associated with visits to abortion clinics.

“Hey boss, we’ve been tracking & selling Barbie’s location data but she just walked into an abortion clinic. How far back do you want me to refund her account?”