Do I need a VPN?

[Debbie292d]

The work I do from home is transcription of fed immigration court cases from around the world. It involves me having to research sometimes things about a little hamlet in a Third World Country. I've been doing this for about a decade. I got spooked about looking things up last night.

Do I need a VPN? I knew very little about those until doing some reading about them today, and am still pretty ignorant of this stuff. NordVPN seems the best at $3 something per month for two years.

What about using this browser? https://www.torproject.org/download/ Is this as good as a VPN for just looking things up, but not let them know who I am?

Does anyone use anything else to mask who you are online? This would only be for several hours per day while I'm sitting at my computer.

@azurbanclucker I know you're computer savvy, but about this stuff?

 

[azurbanclucker]

VPN software like Nord and surfshark are fine. Make sure you're complying with work policy for it. In general, if you're doing research in an official capacity, you should be fine, but you can be traced. That's why VPN's are such a big thing now.

DO NOT USE TOR. Especially not for anything official. TOR is "The Onion Router" and is a common tool used for criminal activity on the "dark web". The onion network is a "community network" meaning all of the exit nodes are privately owned to some extent. Like you could hit an exit on a very illegal endpoint and never know. A lot of it is innocent enough, but unless you really know what you're doing, avoid it. I gave up hosting a tor exit in 2001 because it was too spicy. It hasn't gotten any safer since then.

 

[FrostRanger]

A VPN hides your traffic from your ISP. BUT, whomever your VPN provider is can see it instead. If you're on your home network you probably don't need a VPN, instead I'd just make sure your WiFi network is secure and that your computer itself is up to date and doesn't have any dodgy programs or extensions. The TOR network can be good for privacy but again, you probably don't need it. I can post a bit more about some good ways to harden your security when I get home

 

[Debbie292d]

VPN software like Nord and surfshark are fine. Make sure you're complying with work policy for it. In general, if you're doing research in an official capacity, you should be fine, but you can be traced. That's why VPN's are such a big thing now.

DO NOT USE TOR. Especially not for anything official. TOR is "The Onion Router" and is a common tool used for criminal activity on the "dark web". The onion network is a "community network" meaning all of the exit nodes are privately owned to some extent. Like you could hit an exit on a very illegal endpoint and never know. A lot of it is innocent enough, but unless you really know what you're doing, avoid it. I gave up hosting a tor exit in 2001 because it was too spicy. It hasn't gotten any safer since then.

I'm in no official capacity. I'm security cleared, but I'm contracted to simply type court hearings.

It's my computer, my software, and I just download their court audios, type them up, and upload back (Sharepoint). But to do those accurately, I've got to look up how to spell things, for instance, last night, what cities in X country have "intelligence and security" departments (alleged terrorists). I couldn't understand the interpreter, so I Googled it, then bailed out, too scared to go further. Again, I've been doing this for about a decade and never got afraid to click somewhere before.

I appreciate the info! I'll not consider that browser, and wait for @FrostRanger.

 

[FrostRanger]

Now that i am not trying to type on my 15....
Depending on what browser you use (Firefox is better for privacy as it's easier to harden and has less telemetry to begin with) there are some settings you can change
1. Turn off third party cookies, most sites don't need them for anything important and they are often used for tracking purposes

2. Go through all your extensions, evaluate if you really need them and what their privacy policy and terms and conditions are

3. There are a few good extensions I use but the main one I recommend is ublock origin (make sure it's that particular one as there are extensions made by other devs that name their extension similarly to fool people into installing it). It's a free, open sourced and one of the few good adblockers out there. As controversial as they are they are basically a necessity especially when browsing dodgy sites as a lot of malware comes from bad ads, some of them will give you a virus even if you don't click on them. You can of course whitelist any sites you don't want to block ads on. Noscript is another good one but it adds a lot of hassle as you need to enable scripts site by site. I would stick with ublock origin for the time being

3. If you're using Firefox, set the tracking protection to strict in the settings

4. Go through your installed programs and make sure there's nothing weird and read through the license, terms of use and privacy policy

5. There are times when you do need a VPN, those are
1. You use public WiFi a lot
2. You torrent (even if it is a legal torrent. A guy got in trouble with his isp for torrenting Ubuntu straight from their official torrent
If you do need or just want a VPN, protonvpn and ivpn are both good and neither keep logs (iirc in the case of protonvpn this has been proven in court cases where logs were demanded of them and in the case of ivpn they have a warrant canary on their website). Both are good although I do prefer ivpn due to their brutal honesty and the best customer service I had the pleasure of using (I had accidentally gotten the year plan instead of the monthly plan. I emailed customer service and a real person got back to me in less than 15 minutes and made it right)


There are of course many other ways to guard your privacy and security but those are the simplest ways