I have been reading about internet privacy for a long time. As time went on, I got a vpn subcription, a custom domain, a paid email hosting, etc. No regrets on the services themselves.
I recently had this conversation with a colleague of mine, complaining about the rising cost of everything including internet subscription services: netflix, spotify, youtube, you name it. I could simply disregard my colleague’s complaints as I didn’t have any of those and know the ways of obtaining materials. However, once I start adding up the privacy related services I’m willingly paying instead… they also add up into a considerable amount.
So, do you pay for anything privacy related, how much do you pay in total, and is it affordable for you? For example, many VPN providers offer yearly subscriptions around 40-50 USD.
Something that people do is self-host software that respects its user’s privacy more than services some company provides to you for a monthly subscription. For example, you could host your own music streaming software on a server that you rent instead of using Spotify.
But what privacy do you have if you host on someone elses computer? That is what I am asking because I see a lot of people doing VPS but I don’t understand why from a privacy perspective you would do that.
Oh, so you simply don’t see any difference between VPS rented from a reputable company and just storing data in google’s DB. Well, I assure you those are different. VPS provider does not scan all servers, extract all the certificates from them, setup a MITM to intercept decrypt and analyse the incoming traffick, scan all your DBs to extract your emails and than sell all this data to advertisers. But if you believe they do than yes, renting VPS offers no benefits.
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That’s a good question. The hope is that the VPS provider is not reading the disk or sniffing the network traffic and using that information for commercial gains. For example, I could try to find a trustworthy VPS provider with a clear privacy policy for my music streaming server. To the provider, all they ideally see are encrypted bytes over the wire (probably using Wireguard or HTTPS for example).
Spotify, on the other hand, rely on customer usage data for their business. They sell advertising and do things like suggestions based on listening history across many users.
There is no guarantee that using someone else’s computer is 100% private. But it is probably more private than Spotify in this music streaming example.