HideMyAss provides FBI with logs for LulzSec

Then, why all of these VPN services exist? Whats the point of using a VPN service if they give all of your details when a court order in place?
Dont get me wrong, i understand that internet isnt a anonymous place and you cant hide truly. But then.. what do VPN services offer? If you are not doing something illegal according to your country's laws (it can be a law about free speech or criminal activity, doesnt matter) why the hell you need to use a VPN service? Whats the point? Just to watch Hulu or Netflix? Whole VPN idea is just a hoax? In other words, if you cant be anonymous in internet, all VPN services are just.. cheaters?

 

Well, no, I don't think they are "cheaters". There is a place for them, it is just that you cannot place your trust in them. The biggest problem is not so much being labeled a criminal now, it's the issue of more and more government blanket spying. VPNs can still help somewhat against the throwing the baby out with the bathwater stance that has been taken. However, there may come a time (it's assured, actually) that governments will say the same thing you are, that if we're not doing anything we don't want seen, we don't need them.

That opens us up to not only full on government spying, but also being labeled as criminals, dissidents, terrorists and so on, if we choose to use them to maintain a shred of privacy in our lives. The point is not that they are useless so much as it is that, when the fires get lit underneath the feet, service providers will readily hand over anything and everything. By all means, use the services, but don't be misguided into thinking nobody will know what you are doing.

 

lol the point is to use them for things that aren't illegal but you want to keep private the only problem is that most people who care so much about privacy are doing things they shouldn't be

 

Hmm, actually I could argue against that, lol. The only other "privacy" threat beyond the escalating blanket spying, is the tracking done by third party ad servers and other simple things. These are things that can be thwarted without a VPN. And see, you're taking the stance that Google, Facebook, the governments and all are taking. It's your right to believe that way, but I wonder how far you'd actually take that way of thinking. I'm not one of those guys in a bunker waiting for WW3, but I am one of those who reads deeper into things,doesn't think what is printed or heard is all there is to it and have knowledge of a lot of things happening behind the scenes.

Believe me, it is not just a worry for naughty boys and girls anymore.

 

I'd take it as far as I have to. I basically live by that every day, it's not some active thing. I'm not throwing around my personal information like it's nothing but I'm not going to hide behind a VPN either, why? Because I'm not a criminal and if I'm not doing anything wrong I really don't have a lot to fear.

Why are people so afraid of some useless information being out there? I don't care if some people on Facebook know that I just "checked in" at my restaurant. I don't care if google knows I'm buying new furniture for my house. It really doesn't matter unless I'm trying to hack a site, download illegal content, or distribute illegal content, and if someone is doing those things they really don't deserve privacy.

 

Nah, I don't care about those small things either, it hurts nothing. But, with location tracking and such (which is either impossible or next to impossible to thwart on mobile devices), it still helps to provide advertisers with ever more about you, and can still be used by hackers for nefarious things. It's not so much a thing about who is doing what, it's a simple question of why is so much data being collected? Who is collecting it? What are they doing with it?

There is a lot more going on than simple trading data for services, which is what I think you have a habit of focusing on

 

Not so much idiotic as simply a standard way of thinking. There is still far too much trust placed with companies and governments. It makes sense, who expected the "Do no evil" company to do evil? Who expects governments (outside of dictatorships) to do harm? People just don't think that way, and, really, they shouldn't have such paranoia as to think every little thing is a plot. But, they should do more than read a newspaper, listen to the news, and blindly trust.

So no, it isn't idiotic, it's normal.

 

Gosh, those ads might tell me about the hot girls I can meet with in NYC? Better purchase a VPN to I get ads for hot girls in Amsterdam instead.

Why is the data being collected? To offer you targeted advertisements, which I will be more likely to click.
Why is so much data being collected? The more data they have the better the chance that those ads will be legitimately useful to me.
Who is collecting it? Google, Bing, loads of sites really but I think Google would probably cover most of it.

There really isn't much more than that. At most you have something like the Google CIA deals where Google uses their algorithms and the CIA provides crime data so that they can see trending areas for crime and place police/ authorities in locations based on it.

There are certainly plenty of projects like that but the extent that people go on about it... really... it's not such a scary world.

If you think I'm not educated about government deals with companies like Google you're wrong. I know plenty about the "dark side" of these stores, I read plenty of so-called underground stories.

 

?a system where no one can or will do this?

I'm not going into all the details, but so anybody who doesn't already know, doesn't get the wrong Idea that TOR is immune to these types of things, and get mislead, you are wrong.

This is not a personal attack, this goes out to everyone, My advice is to learn everything about the different attacks on tor before giving advice about it....

 

lol when the government says "Hey we want logs from you and we'll take you to court from them" you have two options

1) Go to court and lose
2) Give them what they want

 

You wouldnt have to worry about this if you were using a proper VPN, because everything would be encrypted, also why do you care so much about people who are trying to protect their online privacy?

 

I don't have to worry about this anyways because I don't do anything illegal and I don't put anything incriminating on the internet.

It's a sickness.

 

Well good for you dude, But some people are Political advocits, Human Rights activists, whistle Blowers, ect and the list goes on, Have a nice day........

 

I wish I could sit here and tell you that that is all there is to it. The things you mentioned aren't even worthy of consideration. It's not just about business, but that doesn't get discussed on CNN. If you've read about the "dark side" then you do know a little about what's going on. You should also know then that Google and others are simply pawns. It's up to you of course to determine what that means for you.

 

lol I don't get my info from CNN. I get most of it from privacy-centric boards somewhat like this one.

@Warlockz, You too.

 

You spend a lot of time on privacy forums for someone that doesn't care about privacy. Over here, you average out at 19 posts a day. If you don't actually care about the issue, you must get paid by the word.

 

I rarely post on the privacy area of wilders. I'm not too interested in it. I get some information from a few other sites, but usually in some separate context.

 

Ah, such a Wilders classic

The lesson here, in my opinion, is just Shop 101: it's dangerous to misuse tools. HMA and its ilk are appropriate for hot-spot privacy, surfing questionable content and so on. I gather it's been popular for SEO work. But for LulzSec? Wow. That was just stupid.

If privacy is crucial, what do you do?

It's prudent to assume that any VPN provider will give you up in some circumstance. Perhaps the alternative is losing their business, their freedom, or even their life. Perhaps you violated one of their core principles. Whatever. Although they may claim that their systems are designed to prevent disclosure, how can you verify that?

You can reduce the risk of disclosure by nesting VPN connections. Both should be good two-hop services. The outer one knows your IP address and payment information. For the inner VPN, use a provider who accepts anonymous payment (such as cash in the mail, Liberty Reserve, anonymized Bitcoin, etc). Use inner and outer VPNs from different socio-political climates. Russia, Malaysia and the Caribbean might be good choices.

Using a VM is probably the easiest way to nest VPN connections. You run the outer VPN service in the host, and the inner one in the VM. Alternatively, you can establish the outer VPN tunnel on your perimeter firewall, and the inner one on your computer. You could even do both, and nest three VPN tunnels, but the latency is typically too great.

And then there's Tor, I2P, Anonet and so forth. Perhaps someone would like to summarize the key issues. At this point, I just know enough to be a little dangerous ;-)

 

Hungry I am not sure that if its a sickness or not..But folks dont like others to know what they are doing and where they have been..privacy should be respected but not if its against national security or other sensitive issue IMHO

 

I agree. If someone doesn't want something known it's not anyone else's business.

 

"National security" is a very popular catch phrase. Unfortunately, no one seems to know what it means.

The problem with Tor is that the network is known and quantifiable. Tor can protect against traffic analysis but not end-to-end correlation. Since the boundary is always known using Tor is like playing in a sandbox where your comings and goings can be watched. Another problem is that Tor, like most proxies and VPNs, can't hide itself. When you use Tor everyone knows that you are trying to hide. Try opening a Liberty Reserve account or use certain forums through Tor and see how far you get.

The solution would be to chain elite (high anonymous) proxies. Proxies appear and vanish all the time. Unlike Tor their distribution is unpredictable. This can't be good for Big Brother. Elite proxies also hide themselves in that they appear to be normal residential addresses. They do not encrypt traffic like Tor but if you set one up yourself you can certainly set the traffic to be encrypted. Of course, maintaining a list of suitable proxies is a lot more work than just using Tor so this is only for serious privacy hobbyists...and competent hackers.

 

My concern is not about Google or Facebook knowing about me, for me it is the people around me (Although i do like to leak the least information throughout the internet that's why no FB, Twitter, MySpace or any kind of social network)
BUT to be honest, FB is really tempting me but i'm just hard as a rock (You know D00d an 18 year old it's hard to resist to FB given the amount of requests asking for it LOOOOL) But i gotta man up.

Yeah i know you all just got i had 18!!!

 

I completely agree with Necropsie point of view..Why would someone use VPN then?

 

It's a question of who you're trying to protect yourself from. If it's the government a VPN is probably not going to help (as many have already said), but if you just want to protect your website passwords from snoops when you're connecting to the internet at Open WiFi hotspots then a VPN is exactly what you need. Don't think in absolutes. Just because there's no ultimate privacy doesn't mean there's no value in taking modest precautions which provide conditional privacy.

 

What Victek123 said.

Beyond that, VPNs are useful for hiding, from casual observers anyway, the fact that you're using other approaches that offer better protection. If even 10% of the population uses VPNs to hide their perversity and/or petty larceny, let's say, you don't attract much attention using them. If you're running Tor, I2P or Anonet, on the other hand, you stand out from the crowd, and are at risk of being "seen".