Do DIY clouds give you anonymity? I assume that if I run my traffic through a VPN server in AWS and I am the only one operating and using the server, anything I do on that VPN can be traced back to me.
No, they (usually) don't. In fact, given that your ISP likely rotates your IP more often than your AWS server, rolling your own VPN may in fact be a decrease in anonymity in some cases.
The benefits to privacy would be:
- It may still make it harder for your ISP to track you, which can be worthwhile.
- It can still be useful to help hide your physical location, since your IP won't be in the same county as you. That's also not nothing.
For 3rd-party sites, you'll be making your traffic easier to correlate across domains, locations, etc... Up to you whether or not that's part of your threat model.
I run a VPN server via Vultr, and I've wondered if it would be worth the hassle to rotate instances once a week to solve this issue. So, every week, run a script that spins up a new instance, sets up the VPN, and shuts down the old one. If you use DNS to point to the server instead of a static IP address, this can be automated completely without even touching the VPN clients. Hell, if it works well enough, I don't see why you couldn't do this every night.
The ISP retains records. It's not uncommon to get letters from your ISP telling you to stop torrenting that blockbuster movie you torrented last week because some law office reported your IP address at the time. So clearly someone can ascertain your identity through legal discovery if you just use your ISP.
danShumway|6 years ago
The benefits to privacy would be:
- It may still make it harder for your ISP to track you, which can be worthwhile.
- It can still be useful to help hide your physical location, since your IP won't be in the same county as you. That's also not nothing.
For 3rd-party sites, you'll be making your traffic easier to correlate across domains, locations, etc... Up to you whether or not that's part of your threat model.
RussianCow|6 years ago
x220|6 years ago
mirimir|6 years ago
Sure, but they retain records.