Hey guys n gurls, I was wondering if it is smart to disable my VPN connection for casual browsing.

Reasons: when having VPN constantly running it may be possible to track me via browser fingerprinting.

Szenario: the connection coming from the VPN which hypothetically downloaded a torrent, tries to watch capitalist propaganda while living in China, etc.pp has this screen ratio, this locale, this addons etc. And (more important) the YouTube login cookie we know belongs to this physical person/telephone number etc.

So I am wondering if I should only use the VPN when “needing” it (read articles not available in country, Netflix, read information government doesn’t like, things like that.) Or if I’m missing something here and I could obscure my causal day to day browsing as well without decreasing the security of the VPN.

For reference, the VPN doesn’t log anything (for more than a day) to my knowledge

EDIT: From what I understand from the comments: switching the VPN has little to no impact on widely used tracking and if at all makes it easier to corelate data. People emphasize the general lack of full privacy if you are wanted by entities willing to spend enough resources. But for the general need of privacy in normal usecases it makes more sense to just leave the VPN running.

  • Upstream7564
    4·
    1 month ago

    It won’t make any difference. It actually could potentially make you more fingerprintable, since your IP adress is no longer shared with many other people depending on the VPN you’re using, etc.

    At the end of the day, VPNs are not necessary to be not tracked, since your IP adress changes regulary, but it can be helpful in some scenario’s and it’s not harmful either, aslong your provider is not a bad actor.

    • refalo@programming.dev
      3·
      1 month ago

      Personally I’d rather my ISP see more of my internet activity as I think they are less likely to be interested in using/selling as much of my data (or be compromised in some way) as a VPN company. But I could be wrong.

      • Monkey With A Shell@lemmy.socdojo.com
        2·
        1 month ago

        Shortly after the net neutrality rules where first revoked mine sent a message asking me to opt out of gathering data for sale, so defiantly not always the case. Not trusting some checkbox to prevent them from doing so in the future got everything that can be put through tunnels since.

      • You999@sh.itjust.works
        41·
        1 month ago

        In the US pretty much all our ISPs use dynamic IPs by default and charge extra for static IPs. The lease time on the dynamic IP varies dramatically from ISP to ISP.

      • Upstream7564
        2·
        1 month ago

        Oh okay, never heard of this since it’s very unsual to give static IPs to people, especially since IPv4 adresses are very limited in their amount.