Just out of curiosity do you use a VPN, I always browse with a VPN on my phone for precisely that reason and am wondering if it actually works to help protect my privacy.
I route all of my mobile data through a Wireguard VPN on my home's network, and everything on my home network is routed through PiHole where I block/disable a lot of tracking and extraneous junk requests.
Generally speaking, this makes me feel a better when using mobile data or any foreign network (public, friends, work, etc) since I know all of my outbound requests are coming from "one location".
I can reroute outbound access to an external VPN if/when needed, but it's really a crapshoot for who you trust to keep track of your outbound requests. I don't trust any VPN out there to be strong enough to say "NO" to an intrusive 3rd-party like the US gov. No more than my own ISP at least.
For someone overly paranoid about tracking, I would probably suggest just using Tor, but for basic consolidation of internet access, routing through a self-hosted VPN at home works great.
Using a VPN would protect the privacy of your IP sessions from Verizon, although your VPN provider would now be able to see all of your session information.
I suspect a VPN user would show up in the Verizon data file with many large TCP sessions to a very small number of IPs.
I suspect that the effort required to succesfully produce viable evidence from a VPN provider such as Mullvad are significantly higher than the effort we see here from ATT, T-mobile, Sprint, and Verizon.
I am my own VPN provider. EC2 micro instance on AWS running StrongSwan. Sure, feds could dig that up, but it would be messier. I wonder what in/out logs AWS keeps on its VPCs....
None? I've had this for a long time with no issues. That's weird. I'm on it now listening to spotify, reading WaPo and browsing HN. What sites complain? I'll try it?
You might have gotten lucky with the static IP / subnet assigned to your machine.
I set up a VPN on a Digital Ocean instance and got captchas all the time on various websites, especially ones using CloudFlare etc (I’m aware of Privacy Pass but didn’t bother setting it up as it was a temporary thing)
You can always use Privacy Pass as quite often you're dealing with CloudFlare protected sites.
That said, if you're using your own EC2/lightsail instance you won't see as many CAPTCHAs as, say, using a commodity VPN service.
Given you can't detect a VPN per-se (if configured properly) usually the way it works is that the destination node knows you're coming from a source IP from a known VPN-supplier's well-known IP-block.
If you go for this kind of setup (running your own VPN on AWS) you're simply changing your ISP to Amazon. They still might (and probably will) be monitoring egress traffic at the very least to perform any kind of incident analysis.
t3.micro = $0.0104 x 750 = $7.80/mo without taking your bandwidth into consideration.
Lightsail costs $3.50/mo with 1tb transfer bundled or $5/mo with 2tb.
If your setup is scripted then it probably makes sense to switch over to save a bit of cash. Others following the same path could save some money by using Lightsail as opposed to EC2.
I know I'm not selling my requests? I don't have to trust lightsail. Sure, I have to worry about AWS keeping logs of my requests but that seems less likely? Is that your argument?
Lightsail is basically an EC2 instance packaged with an ipv4 address, storage and bandwidth to compete with low cost VPS providers.
I personally use lightsail for most always on things and then just use ec2 for on demand workloads, because it works out far cheaper (these are just random personal projects so I'm heavily optimising for low cost)
You can't configure the lightsail instances as much as an EC2 instance, but otherwise it's essentially the same product (both operated by AWS).
