I’ve been using one but I’m not sure what benefits I’m getting from it. I feel like the only thing happening is I’m adding a little bit of latency to all my requests for no reason.

  • 3aqn5k6ryk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    62·
    2 days ago

    Most people in the US use it to avoid getting letter from their ISP from downloading illegal content.

    Some people use to access other country content.

    Some people use it to avoid ISP snooping their browsing habits

    • abrahambelch@programming.dev
      3·
      19 hours ago

      Genuine question: How can an ISP detect that someone is downloading illegal material if the actual content is encrypted using SSL/TLS? Is it all approximated based on the domains/IPs and the amount of data that is sent? If they can’t tell with a 100% certainty, can it be used as proof when trialed in court?

      • ExperimentalGuy@programming.dev
        1·
        18 hours ago

        I’m not an expert but I’m guessing unencrypted DNS requests and potentially monitoring IPs of different torrents. DNS requests would show what websites a user is going to, and then you can always see peer IPs when connected to a torrent.

      • cmeerw@programming.dev
        8·
        14 hours ago

        Isn’t that mainly just torrent trackers that publish your IP address and then the ISP gets a request for who was using that particular IP address. I don’t think an ISP would itself be interested in detecting whether their customers download illegal content - there is no business case for them to do that.