I use Proton. But I continue to run into more and more websites and services that detect my VPN and refuse my connection, or just run literally 40 captchas in a row until I just give up.

I use Proton because it has a “suite” of products under a single subscription, but that benefit is losing it’s allure as some of their products are pretty shitty from a user experience perspective, their customer support is atrocious, and they don’t seem to pay any attention to what their users actually want.

Does anyone track known VPN servers? Is there a specific provider that causes less problems? Does anyone test different VPNs for detection?

Thinking about cancelling my subscription and moving to Mullvad.

    • hperrin@lemmy.world
      1·
      6 months ago

      What personal information do you think the VPN is blocking? Like, exactly. Precisely what information do you believe the VPN prevents a website from seeing about you?

      I understand the difference between first and third party cookies. You said you were trying to prevent the website from tracking you. A website’s cookie for its own domain is first party. If you block that cookie, it’s harder for them to track you, and also you can’t log in.

      Your IP address is not very useful for tracking you.

      • Residential IP addresses change often.
      • They’re usually shared by a family or organization through NAT.
      • You will often have different IP addresses throughout the day as you switch between WiFi and cell data.
      • Your different devices may or may not share an IP address.

      The major ad trackers use cookies and etags to track you. They don’t use your IP address.

        • hperrin@lemmy.world
          1·
          6 months ago

          Then we agree that’s the only advantage. So your original reply is wrong. A cloud VM running self hosted VPN protects you exactly as much as a commercial VPN with regard to the website you’re connecting to.

            • hperrin@lemmy.world
              1·
              6 months ago

              So just make a snapshot, and every time you want a new IP, create a new VM from the snapshot. Or if there’s an option in your cloud provider, just request a new IP.

              Whenever you connect to a VPN, you use the same IP address the whole session. You have to reconnect to a different node whenever you want a new IP.

              But I feel like you’re just being contrarian here. Your objections aren’t rooted in any sort of actual concern over privacy, and I don’t think you really understand the systems you’re using. In other words, you’re just being paranoid.

              If you want true privacy, use Tor.

                • hperrin@lemmy.world
                  1·
                  6 months ago

                  I’ve been a web and network engineer for 15 years, and I run a VPN on my own production cluster, but sure man, I don’t understand VPNs.

                  Again, you do not understand how trackers work. Trackers don’t use your IP address. And unless Google changed it since I worked there, I can guarantee that.

                  Prove to me that you block etags, cookies, localStorage, and service workers. Prove to me that every request you make spoofs a new user agent string. Prove to me that when you run JS, it obfuscates your screen dimensions and hardware availability. Prove to me that it obfuscates your font list and the available vendor prefixes. Prove to me that your browser adds artificial jitter to your real time clock, cause you can be tracked through that. Hell, you can be tracked through your latency, so prove to me you add random latency to your fetch calls. Prove to me you block media queries, because you can be tracked through CSS.

                  You are paranoid, and you don’t even understand what to be paranoid about.