if VPNs companies don’t own their own Servers but rent them what guaranty that data center can’t access people information for personal and financial reasons ?
A VPN can not provide a guarantee on data privacy. All a VPN is good for besides working around demographic restrictions is preventing your internet provider from snoop your traffic. Outside of that you are still at the mercy of the VPN provider, their policies, and their infrastructure.
Personal information is usually encrypted by SSL (https), so the data center who owns the server wouldn’t be able to see that information. Just like your ISP wouldn’t be able to see it if you were not using a VPN. The difference with a VPN is that it obscures which users are connecting to which websites or services. For example, the owner of the server could see that a connection is being made to Facebook, but they wouldn’t know which source IP (VPN user) is making that connection, or the content inside the SSL tunnel.
In my opinion nothing is guaranteed.
You’d probably want a company that has colocated servers in which they are directly responsible with the upkeep and maintenance of their own servers.
Here is an example of how an EarthVPN user got caught by LE using the logs from data center without the VPN provider even knowing about it. Your VPN can be telling the truth about not keeping logs, but not even your VPN provider knows whether the data center is logging or not.
An EarthVPN representative says the company never stored any identifying logs, but the data center where the server was seized kept IP transfer logs.
Source: https://privacy.net/best-vpn-services/
…they don’t log but the datacenter was logging.
Source: http://www.vpnspblog.com/earthvpn-user-arrested/
With the logs of the traffic to the data centre, rather than the logs of the VPN service, they were able to identify the operative.
Source: " No logs " EarthVPN user arrested after police finds logs | WJunction - Webmaster Forum
truth is, you don’t know.
that being said it’s up to you to find a provider who’s transparent on how they acquire their servers, how they’re setup and maintained, and the individual policy of the data center in question.
some providers (at least mine does) use data centers that have been proven to be “bulletproof” hosting providers that have a history of ignoring abuse reports, take privacy seriously, or their jurisdiction doesn’t cooperate easily with where you are located.
VPNs are a con. They provide protection based on the value of the myth that they protect your privacy. In other words if your secret is considered less valuable than the money you pay then you are safe. If the NSA really wants you no amount of money will protect your privacy. Don’t think they have to admit that the VPN gave them the data. The US government can always make up a story about how you gave away your protection in a bar, at a party, or ordering from Amazon. VPNs are a joke and so is Tor.
Alot of vpn servers are virtual as well
Instead of your ISP snooping now your VPN provider can do the snooping. And if they promise not to, the data center admin with physical access to the server can snoop.
Yeah I was going to write pretty much the same thing. With so many IPs connecting to the VPN node and all connections encrypted, the data centre would be able to see end destination websites like Facebook YouTube etc. However they have no way to link it back to the source IP that requested the connection. However the VPN provider managing the server could log that traffic, so best to choose a no logs policy VPN provider.
In a multihop VPN connection will the first hop be able to see the traffic or will it be encrypted and only decrypted at the very last node?
… the scale of the effort that would be required … Find something useful? lol.
That’s what computers are for, lol. They’re very good at scanning mountains of data to pull out patterns.
I agree that data center is not a big risk. ISP is the biggest risk, so use a VPN to hide info from your ISP.
What the data center admin would see assuming he has physical access and decides to snoop?
Instead of your ISP snooping now your VPN provider can do the snooping.
The big win is that your ISP knows far more about you than the VPN (or data center) does. So the damage a malicious ISP can do is far worse than the damage a malicious VPN or data center can do.
Your ISP knows your name, home address, phone number, probably sees your phone and TV traffic, maybe knows your bank account info. With a little effort, you can give all fake data to a VPN company; they’re used to customers wanting to hide their identity.
So, use a VPN. It’s not a magic silver bullet that cures all problems, but it’s worth using.
How could there be no way to link it back to the source, when IP headers contain source and destination IP addresses?
It depends what Technologie and how many Holz are used. The vpn protocol is old and not designed for privacy. It is destined to connect two locations that know and trust each other.
Something like onion Encryption is a better solution and the SPN from safing.io is making use of exactly that.
Pretty much everything. I’m not a system admin at a data center so take my opinion with a grain of salt but a server is not much different than a desktop PC. Windows Server 2016 for instance looks just like Windows 10. The main difference is that there are server management tools and services built in. Tools and services like Active Directory and Domain Controller and DNS etc. Just having a DNS log is pretty telling. It’s literally a list of every website visited.
A VPN server is not much different than a proxy from a practical standpoint. It’s the end point that makes the get request to the desired webserver. Then it forwards those packets to the VPN client. So the VPN server can see every single website requested just like an ISP can. The traffic may be encrypted but domains, timing, latency, packet size and other details can reveal a lot of information. And HTTP traffic is plain text.
They are encrypted in the tunnel between the client and the VPN server, so wouldn’t be able to see those headers unless you have the decryption key. Unless there is specifically logging on the VPN server to track source and destination IP, it it very difficult to tell.
Pretty much everything.
Nonsense. If you’re using HTTPS, what “they” (ISP, VPN, data center) can see is to/from IP addresses and traffic meta-data (times and volumes). That’s all. They can’t see what pages you’re accessing, page contents, login info, files uploaded/downloaded, etc.